I'm Anil Dash, and This Is How I Work

Take me through your background and how you got to here.

In the 90s, if you knew how to plug in a printer, you could get a job.

It was this or flipping burgers.

A guy hired me to help set up networks and printers.

I started a company the day after I graduated high school, he became my co-founder.

That was how I got into tech.

We were a What do you need?

We got it [kind of shop].

Some places, I was like installing Windows 95 for people.

Some places, writing custom software to help update systems.

Id been around construction [work], so we built software for construction teams.

My parents had a house that they would rent out when I was a kid.

And the tenants would invariably trash it.

So I got to do a ton of construction as a kid.

I would do everything, hanging siding, putting up drywall, doing plumbing and electrical and HVAC.

So I became kind of handy.

But it was fascinating to me, it was how I learned business.

He was a great salesman, still is, and he gave me sales training at 17.

It wasnt persuasion at all.

I would work with these construction companies.

Youre skinny, can you run through the docks and pull some cable?

It was this weird hybrid thing, but it was great.

I had a roster of customers in four states.

So I did that for seven years.

I learned to run a business.

I learned that doing tax paperwork stresses me the fuck out.

That was college for me.

[One] company had not made the transition to Windows, everyone was going to Windows 95.

I pitched a deal for this software porting thing, four months, 25 grand.

I [felt like] I had just hit the jackpot.

Id put on the suit, gone there, pitched them and got it.

That was the dream.

The summer I was 21, I moved up here.

There may have been a girl involved.

I didnt know anybody and the company wasnt doing great.

I was not some master of this stuff.

Then it was brutal.

I got a sublet in the Spanish Harlem, was pretty much broke, the company was going sideways.

I started applying to jobs.

Dot coms had started arriving.

There was a startup doing online video streaming for music videos.

It was a farcical title, but I was CTO.

Most of my day was transcoding videos into Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and RealPlayer.

Building systems to do that.

We would go to record labels and get their videos online.

At that time the clips were like 20 seconds long.

You couldnt put a whole video on dialup.

But I built a pretty good system, and I taught myself to code in PHP.

Its funny, but it was a video portal like YouTube.

Like heres a bunch of video clips.

They werent the whole video, and you had to have the player, the experience wasnt great.

But it was super, super instructive.

The place had been a video production house before.

Theyd pivoted to dot-com world because everybody was.

So it was wildly mismanaged, but it was very educational.

I was living in Manhattan, making 26 thousand a year.

Not a good way to live.

But I was here and I was making a go of it.

Were on the top floor in this big conference room.

In the end they asked for questions.

So I asked, what are you guys doing about Napster?

He said whats Napster?

In that moment I was like oh my god, they dont know about the internet.

Ive got to get out of here.

And the place imploded anyway.

I talked my way into a gig at the Village Voice.

Theres a Prince song on his1999album called All the Critics Love You in New York.

Id taken it to be about the Village Voice.

I got to work with editorial a lot, the people reviewing the events.

Like what do you need if you should probably say whos playing Webster Hall?

How would I list that theyll play every Thursday for three weeks but not on odd weeks?

The technical stuff was really interesting to me.

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

One of my primary responsibilities was the apartment listings, which was how they made most of their money.

And she was like, whos Craig?

I [thought] Im sure theyve got this.

Theyll figure it out.

So I kept my head down.

Two months later was 9/11.

So I was like, Im not going anywhere, Im not messing with this.

In the next month, classified listings dropped [about] 70 percent.

[They blamed it on] the attacks.

I was like, I think people still want apartments!

That month, my friends launched [blog publishing system] Movable bang out.

How did you know them?

The blogging world was small.

You could just see anybody who was doing it.

Id started in 99.

So I was looking all the time at new blogs.

I saw a site called Dollar Short, which [Movable throw in co-founder] Mena Trott had made.

It was incredible writing, incredible design.

And I beta-tested [Movable punch in] as a developer.

It came out and it was a hit.

I was like, you guys are not charging enough, youre going to run yourselves ragged.

A couple months later, Nick Denton reached out.

Said Im building a gossip blog and I want to show something to you.

Hed asked Mena to build Gawker.

[He] got [designer and blogger] Jason Kottke to make the logo.

Mena did all of Gizmodo, and Jason did the design of Gawker.

We met at KGB bar on Fourth.

He had all these mockups on it and he clicked around.

He had like a secret URL for Gawker.

I showed him Gawker.

He wasnt rude, but hes like, yes, Ive been doing this shit for years.

Im like, theyre going to update like five times a day.

Hes like, OK.

Well that didnt go like I thought it would!

I went back upstairs, embarrassed.

Like aw shit, now Im not cool with the cool guy.

He was very polite about it but he was disinterested, like so what?

Around that time, there was a MetaFilter meetup on Bowery.

Nick was there and [Gawkers eventual founding editor] Liz Spiers was there.

Shed been doing an economic blog.

And I introduced them.

I started working on Movable bang out because Id gotten laid off at the Voice.

I knew they were trying to get funded, and none of us knew what venture capital was.

They started paying me out of their pockets.

I helped them put together their pitch, and they raised money from Joi Ito.

That A round was $600,000 on a post-money valuation of $1.8 million.

(Our Glitch round last fall was $30 million.)

And I thought 600 grand was all the money in the world.

I think we immediately sent $400,000 of it to Dell to buy servers.

There was no Amazon Web Services.

So we didnt see any of that.

I [had moved to] San Francisco.

Obama had just come into office.

I ended up building a nonprofit researching how social media would impact politics.

The MacArthur Foundation gave us half a million dollars.

I started working with [Lifehacker founding editor] Gina Trapani again.

But we designed a nonprofit, Gina was leading tech and I was leading engagement.

At the White House they were like, we cant go on Facebook because we have Internet Explorer 6.

It was very Wild West.

The open source project took off, so we turned it into a startup, built a crowdfunded campaign.

At the same time I had founded Activate, a consultancy.

We worked with Dropbox, you name it.

Did a ton of work with Conde Nast.

Doing that in tandem with a startup, Im pretty good but Im notthatgood.

The death knell was, we were dependent on the platforms to give us access to data.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

They never said no, they would just string us along.

Were going to give you that API back in three months, two months.

We couldnt scale up the business if features are going away.

We pivoted to Makerbase, which was IMDb for apps.

It was cool, I wish it existed, people still wish it existed.

But Gina was burnt out.

And she went to work with Paul at Postlight.

In April 2016 on a Monday, we talked and said [the company] is done.

On Tuesday I emailed our investors.

Im not looking at my e-mail right now.

If its important, call my admin.

Oh, they actually dont even give a shit about this thing that Ive been losing my mind over.

Thursday of that week, Prince died.

I was like…Im not enjoying this.

Two weeks later Joel Spolsky called, said Ive got something to show you.

The prior two times hed said that it was Trello and Stack Overflow.

I came by the office, I saw the prototype of Glitch.

It looked cool as hell.

I said, you oughta do blah blah blah, this list.

You have to be able to remix it.

Not fork, remix.

Joel was like, You should come run this thing.

I was like, I just killed a startup, Im not doing this again.

So six months later I joined.

Joel and Michael were so busy running the other companies.

That was our first year and a half.

And while we did that, Glitch took off and people built the first million apps.

And we took the team from essentially 100 percent homogenous to as representative as we could get it.

Lets talk about what youre known for now.

Youre famously the tech guy who loves Prince, you write, youre politically involved.

My public persona is somewhat incoherent.

Most people who know me, know me because of social media.

Theres one way of performing being a public intellectual.

Which is closest to what people know me as.

And then I also am a weird pop-culture obsessive.

People know I like Prince.

I think by normal standards, I would be a hugeStar Warsfan.

I would be a hugeuntil recentlyMichael Jackson fan.

Thats the part Im least known for!

People are surprised to see me in the room when Im in a roomful of activists.

People are still surprised to see me in the room at a tech conference!

Ive written more visible stuff for a longer time than a lot of people that identify as writers.

But nobody introduces me as a writer.

Which is moderately frustrating.

Not for nothing, but I had a column in Wired.

Ive spent twenty years being pissed off that [Postlightco-founder]Paul Fordwrote a thing before I did.

And not just that he got there, but hes a better writer than me.

Paul is a writer, Im a person who writes.

But hes the CEO of a company too!

Lets talk about Glitch.

Theres a correlation between wanting to be a big startup, and doing shady things.

Even intentionally destructive [things].

What, say, Uber does to the labor market is egregious and intentional.

Glitch used to be Fog Creek Software.

Over the years theyd created Stack Overflow and Trello.

A billion dollars worth of companies had been spun out of this company even before it became Glitch.

Trello exited for $425 million.

Theyd only take a tiny bit of funding before that, so it was a very successful exit.

They sold to Atlassian.

Those guys are pretty thoughtful, too.

I mean, I dont love using Jira, but thats not an ethical failure.

And I do love using Trello.

But theyre not the narrative.

And the worst parts of Facebook and Twitter or whatever are.

Why isnt the narrative that Slack is a success, be a success like Slack?

Or Trello, GitHubcompanies are very big, very influential, and are not predicated on being destructive.

It literally constrains my opportunities to lead as the CEO of a tech company.

More tech events want me to come and say Facebook bad!

than want me to come and talk about Glitch.

Even though theres like 3 million apps on Glitch.

Theres like 50 percent more apps on Glitch than on Apples app store.

Some of that is, infrastructure is never gonna be as cool as a consumer facing app.

Its very, very easy to make apps on Glitch.

So use it at work to make apps.

And then pay for it.

Everybodys like, that makes sense.

Theyre all there, too.

Nobody is confused by that.

It is possible to build things that are just the good parts.

And I think thats why people build on Glitch.

People dont worry about being harassed here.

They dont worry about abuse.

And theyre like Every single day I find something kind of makes me laugh or its technically interesting.

It forces you to sit up straight [to keep] your screen clear.

Its a gimmick thing, but its cool its possible!

Shes using cutting edge A.I.

And because its a Glitch app, its all open source and its visible.

So you know the datas not going somewhere else.

You know shes not capturing your information and misusing it.

And thats true of every Glitch app, theyre open source?

Its possible to close them up, but nobody ever does.

But by default theyre all open source and theyre all remixable.

And this is how you train the system to do these things.

And this is how you would make the screen fuzzy because theyre slouching in their chair.

[That app] was in the Daily News, Daily Mail, Vice, all over the place.

And [the developer] is a young woman, Id guess in her early 20s.

And all over the world, people are responding to this app.

Thats gotta feel good.

And it felt good!

Its not a retro throwback thing.

Im not like Were going to bring back ancient internet!

Its just, that was the last time we had this.

Regarding visibility, I keep running into products made on Glitch.

Are you able to see how these things first spread?

Are they bubbling up through some social features on Glitch itself before they break out?

I can talk about a stop slouching in your chair app and thats a very mainstream thing.

Those are a little more within the community, because there are a lot of coders hanging out.

We found, especially amongst our core community, theres a ton of people building music apps around this.

Theyre a coder by day at Google, they go home and they have something they want to express.

Theyre making tons of web VR art.

So Glitch is probably the largest community of VR and XR content in the world.

Were not trying to build YouTube for VR, but its happening on its own.

The phase were in is sort of YouTube circa Lazy Sunday.

Nobody was typing YouTube.com into their web app.

They were reading Gawker or whatever site, and it had Lazy Sunday embedded in it.

And theyre like, OK, this is how I play videos now.

you might definitely imagine creating a video, because you see YouTube videos embedded everywhere.

Sometimes youll read an article and theres a SoundCloud embed of a podcast about that thing.

Thats mostly the space were in.

You want to sign it with your Google account, all the stuff youd expect.

Thats the business were building.

And I would be shocked if a year from now, thats not the majority of our company attention.

But they build each other.

Theres no tension between getting business users on and building the community in a healthy way.

Theres a timer app.

Its literally like, set a countdown timer for 15 minutes.

But its beautiful and its full screen.

I think it was made by a teacher.

Classrooms, like my kids classroom, have a big smart board at the front of the classroom.

It makes me nuts.

His teacher would google countdown timer, find the first result.

It was surrounded in ads.

You have a roomful of seven-year-olds staring at ads on a net web client all day.

That creeps me out.

And its normal to them, so they dont realize it.

But as somebody who knows how this happened to the world, its devastating.

Anyway, a teacher was like, thats sucks, lets just do this.

Itll have nothing but the time, and it works on a touch screen, all that stuff.

And then people start using it at work.

Oh, were going to set timers for our meetings so they end on time.

This is a horizontal need.

Everybody needs this sometimes.

It is not pushing the boundaries of computer science.

It just looks nice and solves a problem.

Thats alongside the apps using cutting-edge machine learning and AI.

I look at people solving problems their I.T.

department will never solve.

And we had that happen internally.

We have acompany handbookthats public, and we publish all our policies there.

And its, of course, a Glitch app.

It keeps track that the same person doesnt get picked three times in a row, all that stuff.

Then we put it out there.

Again, picking a random name from a list is like the first thing you would learn to code.

This is not groundbreaking computer science innovation.

Its just a useful app that solves a problem.

And I can see every team that uses Glitch at work using that app.

Because if youre the person who gets stuck [taking notes], youre so incentivized.

And if youre the person that wants to be good to your co-workers, youre very incentivized.

And it takes away the social friction.

[You dont have to] say, I dont want to do this in this meeting.

Its nice to reduce the friction of being nice.

It still is sometimes.

And I think people have the impulse to create it.

But that app will never be a business.

Nobody can build a startup around reminding people whose turn is to take notes.

So the industry didnt have a place to put that capability.

Youre not going to be like Find it on GitHub.

And therefore join an ad data pipe, and now you serve tons of ads… Theres a million different points of friction.

There isnt a way to share culture through technology between communities or companies.

And thats actually what Glitch is doing.

So I made a little mailing list app.

So right now, there arent assholes on the platform.

For people who want to transgress, theres a path of escalation.

The first wave is, theres people having a bad day.

Someones rude because [their] dog died.

Then there are [people going,] let me see what I can get away with.

Theyre not even malicious.

Theyre just like, you know, teenage boys.

Theyre people being performative about transgression.

Generally, these things are actually not that harmful or toxic.

And if thats allowed to flourish, that opens the door for the intentional harmers.

It sets a tone.

Somebody is using a hateful slur because theyre a teen whos trying to provoke.

And some else like This is a word I believe in using.

Those are indistinguishable in a naive system.

So you have to preclude it.

I think of when I was teenage dirtbag going to diners with my friends at 2 in the morning.

And the rowdiest guy in the group would belch real loud.

And then we were all doing it.

And then you get kicked out.

I dont think anybody was ever like, why did you kick us out?

They were like, you guys are being assholes.

And depending on how they did it, generally it de-escalated.

And thats actually the biggest thing we [at Glitch] do.

I do a lot of what I think of as, Come on guys.

Community management online [is] the same as managing a physical space.

You look at, what would you do in a park?

And it would escalate.

And a drunk guy is not going to back down.

And then theres my late twenties.

Somebodys like, I think you had one too many.

Let me take your keys.

Well get you a ride home.

Its not your fault.

And thats the maturity that hopefully you get.

Every major tech platform is not even at the beginning stage yet.

Theyre at the like, Why dont we let these drunk guys execute the party?

And they are just now arriving at, Hey bro, thats not cool!

And its exacerbating it.

Its becoming a proof point.

Part of it is, the alt right and their cohort are gaming the refs.

I have as much right to be at this party and be drunk as anybody!

Its my fucking house!

So we have [an approach of] Look man.

Thats not what we do here.

Thats our community moderation style.

Because people are like, Were not gonna win there.

And I think thats going to scale.

Its a lot of work.

Your app has been reported for violating rule twenty six dash four.

Were like, Hey, saw this thing.

We dont do that here.

Almost literally those words.

Your app, the description of it has this term, we dont use that here.

There was a guy, I believe in Turkey.

And his avatar was Hitler on his Glitch profile.

I think hed signed in with one of his other accounts and it brought his profile picture over.

I am not fluent in what kind of shitposting a Hitler avatar represents in Turkey!

I dont care to be.

So I was like, yeah, we dont do that here.

I think we hit him up at some other platform and said hey, kindly dont do that.

He just took it off.

There wasnt a dialog.

There was something else like that, a message about self harm.

It was supposed to be ironic, it was bad, we didnt like it.

And the creator of it turned out to be a young woman.

She was like, oh, I was being shitty to my friend and we were joking around.

I didnt think anybody would see it.

She said Im sorry!

And she deleted the app.

So we dont have to police a mob of people.

And also, we havent built a ton of social features.

I think the only groups that will have those kinds of features will be paid teams.

The companies that are using it right now are Google and Microsoft and big, big companies.

They have their own issues.

But thats not going to be one of them.

Theyre not going to build widespread hate apps.

Those things are all intentional design.

And Ive been doing this for 20 years.

I know how we fucked it up on LiveJournal back in the day.

It wasnt fundamentally broken, people were able to get help.

And that freeing of information was really powerful.

So we [had to] change the game.

I wish theyd done it faster, but the team did it and owned up to it.

And the community is on board with the shift.

That taught us, lets not even get to that point, [lets] have nothing to fix.

It is 100 percent doable.

And at the scale of millions and millions of apps.

I think about Apples app store versus Google Play.

Apple sets a tone.

And I would disagree with some of their choices.

But they actually dont get a ton of transgressive apps submitted, because people know theyre looking.

Now, I dont like the submission model.

I think that is not compatible with the open web and with activism and journalism.

And in fact there are acts of journalism that Apple banned from its store.

Part of the reason I dont want the approval model…

So there are adult toys that are internet connected.

The majority of those sex toys are proprietary, terrible apps, [just] like bad smart-home devices.

So theres a movement of open source, open access sex toys.

And theyre like, Glitch is perfect for this.

But Ive got grade schoolers learning to code on Glitch.

And they cant search for butts and find your smart butt plug.

Because theyregoingto search for butts.

It was great to watch this conversation play out between these two people who were both invested.

One, they believed in Glitch.

But also, theyre both like, I love and respect what youre doing.

Very mutually, What youre doing should exist in the world.

So how do we solve this?

And the conclusion really quickly came to this feature were building.

Everybodys conception was like, oh, make a not safe for work flag.

[But] that is not what this is about.

Neither grade school nor butt plugs are work.

What I want us to articulate is just dont show this to kids.

That can be because youre doing journalism on police violence.

Theres a million reasons.

Not Im adjudicating as a platform that you dont get to be a work tool.

And also, sex work is work.

Well then theyve expressed their intent to us.

Thats very easy for me to moderate!

So by designing this system to allow a creator to express intent, now weve got a dialog.

Now weve got a community, not a platform where people can inflict themselves on upon each other.

you’re able to talk about what you were trying to do, and we can respond.

It seems like a fundamental way to check that it can scale later.

You cannot undo.

you’re free to only anticipate.

And we wont catch everything.

But everything that is a known issue, shame on us if we dont handle that.

A while ago I was talking to a person who runs a very large, very visible platform.

And I said, oh, this mutual acquaintance of ours was doxed for their work.

And they were like, whats doxing?

Same conversation I mentioned swatting.

And they didnt know what swatting was.

The isolation and the lack of accountability is so extreme.

Multiple senior leaders on our team have been in that position and are fluent in it.

But if you say We dont have anybody whos familiar with massive major cultural vulnerabilities, thats routine.

At our publisher G/O Media,our union contract is public.

I grew up in a union household and I worked in the trades and construction for years.

The company started as Fog Creek in 2000.

Joel Spolsky was our founding CEO, and Michael Pryor was his co-founder.

And from day one, [they were] super transparent.

Joel made his name by blogging about how they were running the company.

Very early on, Joel made a salary ladder.

Heres how compensation works and how it’s possible for you to advance.

Michael Pryor, the other co-founder, he became CEO of Trello.

I was like, so Michael, what [incident] happened?

Like, why did you oughta do this?

And he was like, what do you mean?

This is the right thing, thats what we just do.

When I joined here, we started capturing, What are our values?

And wed found so much value over the years in sharing things publicly.

You put in all the factors, your years of experience and what role youre in.

And it was informed by data from the whole industry.

And people loved it.

So we spent a year working on salary transparency.

We realized, we have other H.R.

policies and company policies that are valuable.

And everybody found it empowering to have them documented.

When I introduced the climate leave policy, we saw the power of that.

Half our team is remote.

We had people displaced simultaneously by wildfires and hurricanes.

Same as sick leave.

We track it the same way.

And that blew up.

Obviously activists want to be able to point at it.

Heres a thing we need to be mindful of.

But it was also just pragmatism.

It was not contrived.

I think people are like, this is this social justice warrior CEO, performing.

I was like, we have multiple people on our staff currently displaced!

So we have to write a policy!

Maciej Ceglowski who doesPinboard[was] very cynical.

He didnt say it this way but he came just shy of saying this is virtue signaling.

Like Youre just saying these platitudes, of course youre not going to fire these people.

You might have that confidence, but I dont.

Obviously some of this is us showing off our products.

The handbook is a Glitch app and we want people to use it.

Were proud of that.

you’re able to remix it and change it yourself.

Not every company can afford to do the things we do.

We didnt have to inflate the rat in front of their office.

Theres this 20 percent of very high paying companies in tech.

And generally they are paying for you to hold your nose as you walk in the door.

Can you talk about the effect of that?

I mean, we pay well.

And generally they are paying for you to hold your nose as you walk in the door.

If you want to work on the self-driving car team at Uber, youll make a shitload of money.

And we all know why.

But we peg it to, I think, the 75th percentile on core compensation, on cash.

All that stuff goes away.

Benefits, we over-index on.

We do 16 weeks parental leave whether its adoption or birth, whatever your gender is.

And people take it.

We encourage taking it.

Same thing with vacation.

We really encourage taking it and were good about it.

But theres also functional things.

Our workday ends at the end of the workday.

People go home at 5:30, 6 oclock.

Including me, I go pick up my kid from school.

Theres even expectations of boundaries around alerts on Slack.

It doesnt send off-hours notifications.

We dont do death marches.

Were building private offices for all of our coders.

So theres a lot of creature comforts, certainly no hardship.

And theres a real alignment to what were doing.

Everybody understands where were going and what were trying to do.

We want everybody on the web to be able to build the web.

And many people who were independent entrepreneurs.

They know the tradeoff.

I tell people, Im very appreciative, you could be anywhere.

Now a majority of the team are women and nonbinary folks, including in management.

I think 30 percent of our team identifies as LGBTQ.

I think Im the only South Asian man in the company.

Pretty unusual at a software company.

I think theres a long way to go.

We still work in tech, we still have to work with companies.

Everybodys talking about right now within the tech industry, like, are you going to work with Palantir?

Fortunately, theyre not using our product so I dont need to worry about that right now.

But I cant yet articulate why thats different than working with Amazon or Google or Microsoft.

And were going to work with those companies.

And also they do amazing things!

I look at the Chrome team, Im like this shit is amazing.

So theres going to be compromise.

I think that comes from that level of trust.

We were very intentional, the investors do not have a board seat.

And thats fairly unprecedented.

Especially at the scale of what were doing.

Theyre very supportive, we have a tremendously positive relationship with them.

And where you get the money matters.

Theyre going to say This social justice warrior tried to prove a point and therefore couldnt build a business.

I feel that pressure every day.

Im really really driven to succeed at it.

So we have to win.

Because we have to prove its true.

Its not that others haventlike I said, Slack won without being bad for the world.

But the narrative isnt that.

Theyre that weird messaging app and theyre not a consumer brand.

I was losing my lid when Janelle Monae tweeted about Slack.

That should be us.

But, you know, give us a year or two.

This interview has been edited for clarity.