Live Episode! BuzzFeed: Jonah Peretti

In 2001, when most of us had no idea what it meant to "go viral," Jonah Peretti shared an email prank among his friends — and saw it spread to millions. That began his fascination with how information spreads, and set him on the path to launch two of the most powerful media organizations of the Internet age: The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. Recorded live in New York City. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Support for this podcast comes from American Express Open. If you listen to How I Built This, you're curious about ideas, and you probably have some ideas of your own. American Express Open can help you with money and know-how, so you can turn those ideas into action. Visit open.com to get business done.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  And I come out, and Ariana's having breakfast. So then we have our meeting, and she's talking about, you know--

• 0:27Guy Raz?

  What she wants to do.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  I don't even really remember. It just was kind of, you know, it was like, she was charming and smart and, you know, fun to talk to. And then a little while later, she's like, "You have to meet Phil Angelinis. He's running for governor of California." And then Ariana's introducing me to Phil Angelinis. But Ariana is like, is like introducing me to Phil Angelinis. And he's like, "He should be your head of digital." You know, and I'm like, "What?"

• 0:53Speaker 01

  He's like a digital genius, you know? And then I'm like, "I live in New York City. I don't work in politics." And like, I didn't even know that Phil Angelinis was, you know, a person until--

• 1:04Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Earlier this morning, and now I'm going to be his head of digital.

• 1:15Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:27Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how an anti-corporate prank and a viral email inspired Jonah Peretti to build two of the most powerful news organizations of the internet age.

• 1:45Guy Raz?

  So if you were to walk into an office building and get into an elevator with a whole bunch of other people, you wouldn't necessarily pick out Jonah Peretti as the media mogul in the elevator. In fact, he looks more like a graduate student, pretty young, pretty casual. And when I met him a few weeks ago for a conversation in front of a live audience in New York, he was, of course, wearing a hoodie.

• 2:09Guy Raz?

  I want to start by asking you the question about the tech uniform, because everybody wears hoodies. What is the story with it? I mean, they're comfortable. I have hoodies.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  People get mad if you don't wear them.

• 2:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah, they don't invite you to parties.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Particularly like business people. If I wear a nice button down and go to a meeting, they're like, "Oh, it's kind of disappointed." I kind of wanted like a startup person.

• 2:35Guy Raz?

  Right. Yeah, I mean, you've got to play the part. Fair enough.

• 2:38Guy Raz?

  So even though he might not look like a traditional media mogul, by almost any definition, he is. Because Jonah Peretti co-founded The Huffington Post, a news site that totally disrupted the journalism world. And if he stopped there, that would be impressive enough. But he didn't. While at Huffington Post, he started to tinker around with an idea that would become BuzzFeed, a company that just six years ago, didn't even employ a single journalist. And today, it has a bigger news team than most newsrooms in America. Now Jonah isn't a journalist. He's not a coder, he's not a businessman, and he doesn't come from money.

• 3:21Guy Raz?

  So you might be wondering, how did he do this? Well, the story begins just after Jonah graduated from college. He took classes in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz in Northern California. And he had to decide what to do next.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  So I was trying to decide whether to be a teacher or to work at a startup. And then I love teaching. Through college, I made money by teaching. I saw there was some thing where you could get hired as a teacher. And I just, when I was on a trip with my mom, and I walked into it, and they were like, I was like, "I don't have a teaching credential." They're like, "You don't need one." And I was like, "Oh, great." And there was a school in New Orleans that was just starting a computer education program. And they had gotten a grant, and they got all these computers. And then I flew to New Orleans to interview for the job. And it was the Newman School in New Orleans, and their logo was an alligator. And I had to present to a bunch of second semester seniors.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  I taught them how to do web design and make an animated GIF. And I animated the school mascot so that the, I'm gesturing now, if you're not in the live audience. I'm making an alligator with my fingers.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  And it would move its tail and open its mouth. And they were like, "Oh, my God." Like, they saw the alligator thrashing and thought it was the coolest thing. And I taught them to do web design, and I forgot to close one of the tags on the HTML. And so, none of the pages worked, so the lesson totally failed. But the animated GIF alligator saved me, and so I got hired.

• 4:52Guy Raz?

  It seems like that experience, because you were there for three years, right?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:55Guy Raz?

  At that school. It seems like that experience was like a kind of a turning point for you. I mean, you started to look at technology, especially the Internet. You start to develop some early ideas about it that would eventually lead you to where you are today. What were you exposed to? What were you thinking about at that time?

• 5:14Speaker 03

  I mean, I was thinking about how to connect with my students and to get them to learn things and get them excited. And that is something that has heavily influenced the way I think about content. Because I think if you think about content from, at the time, print and broadcast, you think about making something that you push out to this giant audience. But if you're in a classroom teaching 25 kids that are in front of you, you start, you quickly start to learn that the really good teachers are shaping the curriculum based on the feedback they're getting from the students. They're trying to read the room and read the audience and get them more engaged. So I was designing virtual role-playing, historical role-playing in virtual worlds and some of these early VR things.

• 5:57Guy Raz?

  This is like the late 90s.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:58Guy Raz?

  When you're doing this, yeah.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  And so, and I could teach about anything. We'd do social protest letters using the Microsoft Word wizard. You know, we could do any topic because technology was new. So from the reaction of the students, I could get a sense of what was getting their brains going and do more of that.

• 6:13Guy Raz?

  So how did that lead you to go to MIT to study at the Media Lab?

• 6:17Speaker 03

  I went to the Media Lab because there were really smart people in educational technology and artificial intelligence and people who were thinking about learning and technology. So it was an extension of the interest in education plus technology.

• 6:33Guy Raz?

  So in 2001, you're at MIT, you're-- and you decide to order a custom pair of Nikes. Can you explain what that was all about?

• 6:46Speaker 03

  So I was procrastinating, which is what students do when they have to write a long paper. Someone told me that Nike had launched a service where you could customize your shoes, which was a new, novel thing. I went and I think first tried a four-letter word and it rejected it. And so I was trying to figure out how the system worked and--

• 7:02Guy Raz?

  You could, just to clarify, you could get any word you wanted printed on the Nike-- on the side of a pair of Nikes, right?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, although they had blacklisted a bunch of words. So I was trying to figure out which words do they blacklist? And then I put the word sweatshop in and it went through. So I was like, oh, I can get a pair of Nikes that say sweatshop under the swoosh. And the next day, I got an email from a Nike rep saying that the word sweatshop is inappropriate slang. And so I just responded to the email and said, no, it's in the dictionary. It means a shop or factory where workers toil and are under healthy conditions. Now can you send me the shoes? And then they wrote back another excuse. And we were having this back and forth, which if you're procrastinating writing a paper, this is perfect, right? You're just like, back and forth. And then eventually, they said, we reserve the right to not put that on the shoe. You have to change the ID.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  And I said, OK, I'll change the ID, but can you at least send me a picture of the 10-year-old Vietnamese girl who stitches the shoes together? And then they didn't write back after that.

• 8:03Guy Raz?

  You were the first internet troll.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  I'm sure there's trolls that predated that.

• 8:10Guy Raz?

  So you didn't get-- were you, by the way, were you like an activist? Was this something that was near and dear to your heart?

• 8:19Speaker 03

  I wasn't an activist. I had read news articles about sweatshops, but I wasn't an expert on it. And then I ended up-- and I pasted these emails together and sent them to a few friends and then it became--

• 8:31Guy Raz?

  The exchange with Nike?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, the exchange with Nike. I pasted together, sent to a few friends, and then it became an early email forward. So if you remember in the dark ages of social, there were things called email forwards, where people would forward something they thought they liked to their entire address book. So this ended up-- I started getting emails from strangers. And then it started to hit the activist community, people who really knew and cared about the issue, and people who would send me death threats and marriage proposals and like various, you know, but strangers sending me things, which in 2001 is weird that all of a sudden strangers are emailing you.

• 9:04Guy Raz?

  Were people even using the term viral in 2001?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  It was not anything that anyone really thought about or was on anyone's radar. It was before Facebook, before YouTube, you know, it wasn't something people thought about. So the email forward starts to spread and I get thousands of emails back from strangers and then reporters start calling me and I didn't know much about the sweatshop issue, but I ended up on the Today Show with Nike's head of global PR and Katie Couric like talking about sweatshop labor and I've never been on TV before, I don't know anything about the media.

• 9:38Guy Raz?

  So she's asking you all these questions about sweatshop labor and you have to represent that position?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Well, so she-

• 9:43Guy Raz?

  Did you do some homework beforehand?

• 9:44Speaker 03

  So Katie Couric is a pro and she sensed how weak I was, you know? So like when you have David and Goliath on your show, you don't go hard at David, you know? So I was very nervous, but she wasn't too hard on me.

• 10:04Guy Raz?

  Do you know how many people that email exchange reached?

• 10:07Speaker 03

  There were various news stories that tried to estimate, oh, this probably reached 9 million people or this, but you know, back then, email forwards and things like that were, it was really hard to measure, really hard to understand what was going on. And so I became fascinated with this topic of how does this stuff work? How can a student with no contacts in the media reach millions of people about an issue he knows very little about? And this does not seem like the way the media is supposed to work. It's supposed to be there's an executive or an editor or someone who determines what lots of people see and this was just an emergent thing where sending it to people resulted in more people seeing it and people became the distribution. The way that it spread was the audience became the network.

• 10:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Did people at MIT at the time, because I mean, there were epidemiologists and people probably studied contagion and how things spread, were there people who went up to you and just said, this is a total fluke, like this is a one-off, this can't be repeated?

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Well, my good friend Cameron Marla, who went on to be the first data scientist or head data scientist at Facebook. Was observing this in the Nike email spreading and he said exactly that. He said, "These kinds of phenomena are rare and they're hard to predict. And so this is not, this is not something that you can repeat." And so that kind of drove me to say, "Let me try to make more of these. Let me, let me prove Cameron wrong." So he's saying to you, "This can't be replicated." And you're saying, "Maybe it can." Yeah, and then Duncan Watts, another, another friend who became the, who, who became a friend because I was looking for people to understand this. He figured out the mathematics of six degrees of separation in small worlds, where people

• 11:47Speaker 03

  had this concept that everyone is connected through a few short jumps. And he also had a very pessimistic view and would say, "Okay, it's hard to make things go viral and it's hard to replicate this." And so both of them, it was fun to try to prove them wrong. So what'd you do? So, uh, next thing I did was with my sister, who's a stand-up comic. Chelsea Peretti, I'm from Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Uh, I'd like a little, some applause for Chelsea, that's nice. Yeah, there we go. So, so Chelsea was not on Brooklyn Nine-Nine then, though. She was like doing the parkside lounge to terrible audiences and like just starting her comedy career. But, but we created something together called the New York City Rejection Line.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  And the concept of the New York City Rejection Line is, is, um, it was a phone number where if someone was hitting on you and wouldn't take no for an answer, you could give them your number. But it actually, it was a local New York number. And when you called, you get an automated rejection message. So it would say, "The person who gave you this number doesn't actually want to talk to you or see you again." You can press one to speak to a comfort specialist. You can press two to hear a sad poem written by a kindred spirit. Or you could press three to cling to the unrealistic hope a relationship's still possible." And then she had various comic friends record each of the messages in the phone tree. And, uh, and then after that, we did a project called Black People Love Us, which was a

• 13:12Speaker 03

  website that looked like it was created by these two super white people, Sally and Johnny, who were so proud of having black friends that they created a whole website to celebrate it. And it, it really like depicted what now people would call microaggressions, you know? So it was like testimonials, like, "Sally loves to touch my hair," you know? And, uh, and, um, but, but with Black People Love Us, like, we ended up on Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer talking about race in America.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  So, um, wow. And, you know, Rejection Line was like, we were on CNN talking about relationships. So it was this weird thing where you could make something that would take off and on the internet, spread to lots of people, and then reporters in traditional media would see it and be like, "Oh, I discovered this on the internet."

• 14:01Speaker 03

  And with each project, the timeline for it to spread got shorter. So the Nike email diffused over something like three and a half months, and then Rejection Line was like two months, you know, and then Black Lives Matter was like two, three weeks. You know, so we started to see, and that was just 2001, 2002, 2003, so it was, you know, one a year, and the internet and social got much more connected, even just in the span of 2001, 2003. And by the time you get into 2006, '07, '08, people are trying to make things go viral, and it starts to become a science, and social, you know, YouTube is, you know, taking off, and people are thinking about this as being a way of distributing media for the first time, even though it's still small.

• 14:43Guy Raz?

  So how did you, I mean, this is around 2003, 2004, 2005, you get on the radar, I guess, of people who wanted to create The Huffington Post. How did that happen?

• 14:55Speaker 03

  So Ken Lair was a retired from, you know, sort of retired executive, and he had a lot, he really cared a lot about gun control as an issue, and wanted to figure out how to use the internet to do political advocacy, political action. And so he put together a group of the smartest people on the, in the internet space that could come together and advise him on this. And I was not one of those people.

• 15:21Guy Raz?

  Uh-huh.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  But Duncan Watts was. And so Duncan Watts, the guy I had mentioned before about the six to read the separation guy, Kenny had read Duncan's book, and it said, "You have to come to this thing." So then Duncan calls me and he's like, "Oh, this, this rich guy wants me to come to this thing to help him figure out the internet, and like, you'd be much better at that than I would." And I think I said, "Well, you know, I don't know, like, it seems, kind of like going to Midtown seems kind of like a hassle."

• 15:51Speaker 03

  And then he said, well, you know, and Duncan had broken his leg skiing. So he was in a cast and he's like, well, but this guy told me, this guy has a driver. And he says that after the meeting, I can take his car and go anywhere in the city. And I was like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. So I was like, okay, I'll come with you. So I went to the meeting because, because like we would get to drive around, you know, after. So you meet Ken there and, and how does he, does he say? So Ken has a circle of all these different people and like, you know, like Jeff Jarvis is telling him about blogs. And Scott Hyferman is telling him about Meetup and there's, you know, someone doing mobile stuff telling him about that. And, and I talk about the Nike email and, you know, making, you know, things that are shared on the internet.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  And he's, you know, and he sort of ended not just with me, but a few other people like, yeah, let's do, let's do, let's do a blog. Let's do, let's do some viral thing. Let's do this. And so I ended up working on a couple of projects with him and it was a lot of fun. And he's a great fun person to work with and he had a lot of different experience that I didn't have. Like I'd never done anything in business. I'd been a teacher and worked in an academic environment. And at the, and at the end of working together for a while, he said, let's, let's start a business together. Like I, you know, you know, the internet, I know business, like let's do something together. And, and you said yes right away? And I said, yeah, sure. And we like shook hands and, and, and we didn't know what the business would be though, you know? So it was kind of like, you know, and then, and then he ended up meeting Ariana subsequently.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  And he kind of came back from the meeting saying, she knows everyone in, in business and media and, and, and, you know, politics. And she's bringing it all together. And imagine if you could bring that online. And so he, you know, he started saying, you know, you know, our company with Ariana. And I was like, I was like, what? You know, who's that? I'm like Googling her. Then I was like, well, if we're starting to come to her, I have to meet her. And so I flew out to LA to go meet Ariana.

• 17:47Guy Raz?

  What was your first impression of her?

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Well, I got there late at night and she, and so I went and I didn't meet her. I just went to sleep in her guest room. So I, I wake up at something like six in the morning, which for me is super early, or maybe it was seven. Whatever it was, it felt so early to me and I come out and Ariana's having breakfast. So then we have our, our meeting and she's talking about, you know.

• 18:09Guy Raz?

  What she wants to do.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  I don't even really remember. It just was kind of, you know, it was like talking to her and she was charming and smart and really, you know, fun to talk to. And then a little while later, she's like, you have to meet Phil Angelinis. He's running for governor of California.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  And then like Ariana's introducing me to Phil Angelinis. But Ariana is like, is like introducing me to Phil Angelinis and he's like, he should be your head of digital, you know? And I'm like, what?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  He's like a digital genius, you know? And then I'm like, I'm like, I live in New York City. I don't work in politics and like, I didn't even know that Phil Angelinis was, you know, a person until like earlier this morning and now I'm going to be his head of digital. So anyway, I fly back to New York and Kenny's like, oh, what did you think? And I was like, yeah, let's do it. This can be really fun.

• 19:02Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  So I, I kind of thought it will be, it'll be an adventure. It'll be, you know, I tried to apply these ideas about virality on the internet to a bunch of different one-off projects. The idea of applying it to a company was a new thing. And so it felt like a next stage to try to do that.

• 19:17Guy Raz?

  And at that point, I mean, the, the vision of Huffington Post was to kind of be like a left wing drudge report?

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, Kenny said, you know, in every industry, if there's a Coke, there's going to be a big spot for a Pepsi and the drudge reports out there by themselves. And in every, in political media, if there's a strong right wing thing, there's always room for a left wing. And the internet was being. Underutilized by left-wing or progressive sites. There was a kind of utopia, I mean, there was a kind of utopian, um, left-wing blogosphere, but there wasn't a site that was run like a company and a business that had that perspective. And I think Kenny had a strong vision that that would work at Ariana as well. And I was like, I was more of, I had ideas about how to grow something on the internet. I was still kind of in that mindset.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  It wasn't that I was shaping the vision of Huffington Post in a way. I was trying to think, okay, how do you make the most out of Ariana's network? And bringing those people into the blogosphere? And how do you make the most out of a sticky front page with links where people will come back? I was thinking of kind of those kind of dynamics.

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  And we didn't even have article pages when we launched. We had blog, you know, we had blog posts, which were the only perma-links on the site. And then the headlines all clicked out to other sources. And so you, really, the election drove a lot of the early growth. And as we approached the election, we had to think, how are we going to continue to grow after the election? Or we're going to just die after the election?

• 20:48Guy Raz?

  Is it 2008 election?

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I'm bad with dates.

• 20:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah, no, so, so, I mean, pretty soon, I guess, within a year or 18 months of starting, helping to launch the Huffington Post, you started this side project, this thing that you called BuzzFeed Labs. Before we talk about what it was, what, what was it that you couldn't do at Huffington Post? That, that, I don't know, that kind of gave you this itch to do something on your own?

• 21:15Speaker 03

  I couldn't play and experiment as much as I wanted. We were right from the start, building a company and trying to grow it really fast at Huffington Post. You know, I think when I, Ariana asked me, what's the earliest we could launch the Huffington Post? And I think I told her a date. And then like she announced in the press, like, that we would launch it three days before that or something. And I was like, oh, you know, like, everything was like so rushed and fast. And there wasn't a real R and D or experimentation or research type thing. So I learned a lot at Huffington Post about building a business and startups and, but there were still things I wanted to figure about, media, how media worked? What does it mean when people can share media and become the distribution?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  There were all these things I was still trying to understand. I couldn't do it at HuffPost, so I started BuzzFeed as a lab where I could continue to play and do research.

• 22:06Guy Raz?

  You were trying to figure out why people share things rather than why people just click on things?

• 22:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, why do people share things? What's going to happen in the media industry if the distribution is people sharing with each other, where the consumer powers it? It felt like that was a big shift. And, you know, from the Nike email, where what does it mean that a student can reach millions of people without a gatekeeper blessing it? And what's that going to do to the entire media industry and entertainment industry? What's it going to do to politics? Like, that was a fascinating, big question. And it gets into psychology of what matters to people. It gets into social psychology of how do people want to represent themselves to other people? What do people want to share with other people and why? And what value do they get when they share? So there are all those kinds of questions that I was fascinated by.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  And John, my partner at BuzzFeed, when John Johnson, who started Ivy, is a more academic type guy as well. And so he was very interested in these questions and also in funding BuzzFeed.

• 23:07Guy Raz?

  He gave you some seed money to start it up?

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, when we started, John just paid every month the expenses of BuzzFeed. This is not like your other founder stories.

• 23:17Guy Raz?

  Right, yes, right.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Where it's like a mysterious dashing millionaire who like funds a totally unviable business.

• 23:24Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 23:29Guy Raz?

  In just a moment, we'll find out how Jonah turned BuzzFeed into a very viable business. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to a special live episode of How I Built This from NPR.

• 24:03Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to this special live episode of How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2008, and Jonah Peretti is still at the Huffington Post. But he started this side project called BuzzFeed Labs. And he starts to tinker with an idea, a question, really, that was still pretty new at the time. And the question was, how do you use the internet to spread content?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  The vision was to try to solve the bigger problem of what does it mean when the people become the distribution? And what does it mean when people sharing is how people discover new content? So then I would do anything it took to solve that problem. So it might be developing tech, which we built a lot of tech. It might be hiring really creative editors who can make lists and quizzes. Eventually, as news started to be shared on these social networks, it was building a journalism function.

• 24:56Guy Raz?

  But that happened later. I mean, initially, was it just finding things that you thought could be viral? Like, well, like, I mean, we always say cat videos, right? Or like the dog on a skateboard. Was that what you were experimenting with originally?

• 25:10Speaker 03

  We had something that was similar to BlogDex, where we would crawl sites and look for acceleration. We had a chat bot that would then send out links to people. But you could only have like 20 people connected to it. So it wasn't a scalable business. We built some tool that would scrape left-wing and right-wing sites and then show the differences between left and right. There was like this left versus right thing. We were just doing lots of experiments to try to understand things. We were like a lab, basically.

• 25:38Guy Raz?

  And who was reading BuzzFeed? Was it, I mean, at that time, how many?

• 25:42Guy Raz?

  People were clicking on the site.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  We basically doubled our audience every year from when we launched the site. And it started with something like 200,000 or 300,000 people a month.

• 25:52Guy Raz?

  And where was your traffic coming from?

• 25:53Speaker 03

  We had some of it coming from a small widget on Huffington Post, because Huffington Post only had politics content, so we had a little links to some other content. And then some of it was coming direct to the site. And then when Facebook and Twitter became bigger, that's really when BuzzFeed was viable, because the whole thing we were obsessed with was social. And so first, social unlocked internet memes and humor. Then it unlocked, you started to have things like cute animals and things like that. And then eventually news and entertainment and video and kind of everything. And so as social became bigger, we were able to grow along with it.

• 26:30Guy Raz?

  And how did you do that? I mean, you were a major person at Huffington Post. You've got this side hustle. What were you doing? Were you like doing it on nights and weekends? How did you, were you going back and forth?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  I would just sort of walk between Chinatown and Soho. I would pick up Vietnamese sandwiches for the HuffPost people on my way.

• 26:50Guy Raz?

  You would pick up sandwiches, so on a day-to-day basis?

• 26:54Speaker 03

  There was a jewelry store in Chinatown that had these amazing sandwiches in the back of the jewelry store. And so I would walk from BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed when it had, you know, eight people. And then I would do a traffic meeting at HuffPost with all the editors who were focused on growth and traffic and things like that.

• 27:08Guy Raz?

  When people asked you, so what is this BuzzFeed thing that you're doing? Did you say, oh, I intend to build a media company? Or how did you think of it at the time?

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Well, early on, when John was funding it and we had no revenue and it was like a lab. I mean, we were technically a company, but we were exploring and experimenting. It was only when we started to get a little bit bigger, we launched the website BuzzFeed. We started to have people there who were, whose jobs was tied to BuzzFeed that I thought we should raise some money that isn't from John. I also did never took a salary at BuzzFeed in the early days, so I'd live entirely off the HuffPost. And so I started to feel guilty that my friend was like funding this company and I wanted to go find some outside capital to build BuzzFeed.

• 27:54Guy Raz?

  I mean, I'm just imagining you're going to potential investors and you're like, well, we're trying to create this thing. We're not really sure what it is, but we're really interested in viral content. And this is still before people really... Talked about that or knew about that. Were there investors who were like, I don't, I don't really get what you're trying to do?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, nobody wanted to invest. I have, our first pitch deck is, we, we put it online. So you can actually go see our first pitch deck. And, and I don't know, now that BuzzFeed's done well and grown, people think, oh, that's a good pitch deck. You should pattern your pitch deck off that. But everyone rejected our pitch. And really, the first, the first time we were able to raise money, you know, was from SoftBank, which also was invested in HuffPost. And they, there was another firm that wanted to invest, but they told me I had to leave HuffPost. And so, once there was another firm that said, you, you have to leave HuffPost, then the HuffPost investors were like, no, don't leave. We'll invest in BuzzFeed. We think BuzzFeed's great, you know?

• 28:50Guy Raz?

  And, and so, did you, I mean, were there any moments even before? Because this is still, BuzzFeed is, this is still before you started to create original content. Was there any point where, I don't know, BuzzFeed could, could have gone under?

• 29:07Speaker 03

  I mean, I think we, we were able to raise money before we ever were about to run out of money, but it was hard. And so, I think any, or any startup, in the early days, you question the viability and you question, you know, is this gonna, you know, grow the way we want it to grow?

• 29:28Guy Raz?

  Why was it important for you to essentially transition into creating more of a media company that made content? I mean, you could have just been an aggregator and found the best cat videos and dog, you know, dogs on wheels and probably still been profitable. What was the turning point in your mind that, where you thought, you know, let, let me, let's hire a team. Let's start making our own, stop writing our own content?

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Our investors didn't want us to hire journalists or reporters or many people other than engineers and business people. If you look at all the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, they're, they're monocultures of engineers and business people. They don't really hire people who make and create content.

• 30:11Guy Raz?

  Because it's expensive.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  It's expensive and they'd rather have a model where you just build a platform and then the content comes for free because everyone posts their, their baby pictures or their own viral videos or whatever it is. And, and so, that was the main feedback from investors. We don't want to invest because you're gonna have to hire all these people and that's expensive. And our first investor, Deck, was like, "Well, we're gonna hire some people, but they're test pilots for our technology and maybe we won't hire that many people because we probably wouldn't have been able to even raise money if we had said, "Oh, our plan is to hire lots and lots of journalists and reporters." But I wanted to solve the problem. Like, I wanted to understand, how do you make things that's so meaningful that someone wants to share it with someone else in their life? And in order to do that, you can't just build a platform,

• 30:53Speaker 03

  because if you just build a platform, you're not involved in the actual creation. And if you look at the earlier work we were talking about, of things like "Rejection Line," "Black People Love Us," and Nike, we were making the content and just understanding how it spread. And by varying the content, and tweaking the content, improving the content, finding new sources of inspiration, new sources of creativity, it actually has a huge effect on how things spread. And so I wanted to solve that problem, so I needed creative people to do that.

• 31:22Guy Raz?

  It seems from the outside, and it may be different from the inside, but it seems to the outside that the big turning point was in 2011, when you hired Ben Smith of Politico to be the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed. That was obviously, I would assume that the goal of that, the idea behind that was to really expand your original content.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  The main thing was that we were doing, you know, when BuzzFeed started, the iPhone hadn't come out yet. Twitter was what you had for lunch. Facebook was how you met up with your friends. And the only content people shared were cute animals and internet memes. And that's the kind of stuff we made in the early days. Then we started to notice that people were sharing news on Facebook and Twitter, and that was new. And we got very excited because we said, "Now we can go into the news business." And we felt left out of that because we started to see news being shared. And on a day when there was lots of news, like, we didn't have much to do. And so we could hire Ben Smith, and we had another general election coming up.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  We learned from Huffington Post that building a news business in the run-up to election is a good time to do it. And so Ben joined, hired a really great crew of reporters, beat reporters covering the election. And we built our news business in that election, and then was able to grow it from there.

• 32:51Guy Raz?

  I want to just digress for a moment. I want to ask you about a very controversial decision that BuzzFeed took earlier this year to post the contents of the Trump dossier, right? Which was, which suggested that there were all kinds of things that happened in a hotel room in Russia, et cetera, et cetera. Buzz, the administration, or it was before the administration was inaugurated, they went crazy.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  So you think that's the point where they went crazy?

• 33:27Guy Raz?

  Do you think that, I mean, do you think that you would have done that again? Do you think that was the right decision to make, given that, you know, there really isn't a whole lot of consensus about whether it was accurate?

• 33:40Speaker 03

  I definitely think it was the right, the right decision. And the reason we published it was because you had everyone in the senior levels of government and media talking about this document and referring to the document, even in public communications. You had the president, the president-elect, and he briefed on the document, but the public was totally in the dark. You know, and you had CNN saying, oh, this document exists, and Harry Reid saying-

• 34:06Guy Raz?

  So you felt people should at least have exposure to it?

• 34:08Speaker 03

  So this was something that could be hugely important to the country, and the public didn't know, didn't know what was going on. They just knew something was up. And it felt, you know, so we, we think that news is really, particularly with the internet, news is really moving from a period, a long period where you would trust a few news anchors to tell you, this is the truth, and you had to kind of believe them based on their authority, to the public really wanting to see the work and understand what's, what's actually happening.

• 34:39Guy Raz?

  But I mean, doesn't it, doesn't it in a sense kind of feed into this narrative that Donald Trump has, that the, the news media is fake news when, when there are things that are published that are not accurate? Isn't there a danger of, of that as well?

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Well, I think that definitely there is a danger of having the president call everything fake news. And it makes it very hard to know what does that word even mean?

• 35:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  We were very clear and careful when we published it, that this was a document that was circulating, that some things in it, we were able to- Determined were not true and that there were many unverified things in the document. And that we were publishing it so the public could see what was being discussed. So we weren't publishing it saying this is a bunch of things that we were verifying and saying are true. On the contrary, we were actually reporting out what was actually happening and what the conversation was about.

• 35:34Guy Raz?

  So turning back to BuzzFeed, I mean, your business model is around advertising, obviously.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 35:40Guy Raz?

  And one of the things that you guys really pioneered was, people call native advertising or sponsored branded.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Branded content, sponsored content.

• 35:49Guy Raz?

  Which is controversial in the news world, right? It's basically appears to some people to be indistinguishable from reported pieces. Tell me the thinking behind that and why did you think that was the right way to go?

• 36:08Speaker 03

  It actually is in that first pitch deck, which it was, I looked at the best businesses on the internet and they tended to use some form of native advertising. So Google had a search engine and you enter a keyword in and it would give you a bunch of related links, but it would also give you a bunch of related paid links and that's how they made their money. And what that meant was the core engine that Google built, which was search, would help serve the consumer with organic links and would make them more money with paid links and they could invest that money back into making search better. And so that was a very different model than when you looked at publishers. Like at Huffington Post, it was so frustrating to me that we build all these tools and technology to grow Huffington Post and then the way we made money was banner ads that were powered

• 36:53Speaker 03

  by some other technology company that we didn't control, that often slowed down our site and made it harder to read or blocked the content on the site. And when we got better at making the technology for our editors and writers and audience, we didn't actually get better at making money. That was like someone else's job. And so BuzzFeed is, I don't want to make that same mistake. I want the core engine of BuzzFeed, which is creating amazing content people love and want to share across the social web, to also be our business model, where we can take all the things we learn and apply that to our advertisers. So one, like, quick example. When quizzes got really big, a month after that, we could have a branded quiz for HBO,

• 37:36Speaker 03

  which is, "How will you die in Game of Thrones?" And you answer questions, and it'll be like, "You'll be trampled," or "You'll be beheaded." And, like, it was, it got a million views, users loved it, the byline was HBO, it was clear it was about HBO, but it allowed us to make advertising that it didn't suck. It allowed us to make advertising that people actually liked. And when we got better at making something like a quiz, we also got better at making money. And so that was, that was the thinking from the start.

• 38:02Guy Raz?

  How do you know how to make something go viral? Do you have a gut sense for it? I mean, are you, is it just something that you intuitively know how to do?

• 38:12Speaker 03

  It's as complicated as human psychology, which is why it's so interesting. There's a bunch of things. The reason humor works so well, and the reason cute animals work so well, is that there are natural ways that people bond with each other. If you go out for drinks with your friend, and people are telling jokes, the next day, you don't remember the specific jokes, you just remember you laughed with your friends, and you feel closer to them. Or if you pet the family dog, and everyone gathers around, you feel closer to the dog, but you feel closer to everyone in your, in your family. Feeling the same emotion at the same time, or laughing with people, is a way of bonding with people. And so, when we started BuzzFeed, everyone thought of content as information to get in people's head. This is the article, are people gonna read it and get the information in their head?

• 38:54Speaker 03

  We had this insight that content was, on social, was a way of connecting with someone in your life and building a closer relationship with them. And then from there, it started to expand in a whole bunch of different areas. You share this content to express your identity. I'm from, you know, if I'm from Oakland, and I see something about Oakland, that's like, what signs you grew up in Oakland, I will share that. Because I want my friends who also grew up in Oakland to connect with me.

• 39:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  But I also want people who didn't grow up there to know what it's like so that I can feel closer to them. And so we started to always think from the perspective of the audience and what are their social needs? What are the jobs that they want to achieve in their life? What are the things that matter to them? And can we use content as a kind of glue to help them do that?

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  While you were, and while you were building the company and as you continue to develop the company, you are the CEO. How did you learn how to be that, how to do that job? I mean, that wasn't what you were trained to do. You didn't go to business school. You didn't have that background.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  No, I'm very unqualified for the job that I have.

• 39:56Guy Raz?

  So how did you, but how did you figure out how to be the CEO of a company?

• 40:02Speaker 03

  I'm still figuring it out. It's like constantly learning and the company changes so much every year that I have to learn and evolve. I read lots of books. I read lots of business books. I read Harvard Business Review on airplanes. That's like.

• 40:16Guy Raz?

  Really?

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:16Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Because I didn't go to business school and I didn't know, you know, so. And actually Harvard Business Review is a good example of why people share. So people like to say that they read Harvard Business Review or share articles from Harvard Business Review because it seems like they're smart and like, and it has the word Harvard in it. And so even if I, even if I didn't read Harvard Business Review, you still might say that. So people would think, oh, he's qualified to be a CEO. He read an article in Harvard Business Review.

• 40:53Guy Raz?

  You guys are still a private company. You got an offer from Disney to buy BuzzFeed, I guess, in 2013. From what I've read, a pretty, pretty nice offer. How much money, by the way, did they offer you?

• 41:08Speaker 03

  I don't remember.

• 41:12Guy Raz?

  So, so why, why did you turn him down?

• 41:16Speaker 03

  I think that part of it is a gut thing or an emotional thing where you just didn't feel ready. I felt like there was a lot more we had to build. At the time, we were really a website and our video business had just started. It was growing so much and, and I knew that that was going to be a big part of our future. I valued our independence a lot and thought that there were a lot of things we could do on our own. I worried about being part of a big company and being so, so small relative to the company that might own us. Where I, I feel like we wanted to figure out how to invent the future of media and how things should work in the future. And we wanted to make sure we had the independence to do that.

• 41:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  So, so, so, you know, maybe it would have, maybe it would have been great, but I think, you know, I'm happy with the decision and I, we, we've been able to do a lot as an independent company.

• 42:05Guy Raz?

  You, your company, the, the last valuation was like one, one and a half billion dollars. It may be valued higher now. When you, when you think about that number, one and a half billion dollars, it has made you, whether you like it or not, a rich person. You're a rich man. Does that mean anything to you? Does it, is it just a paper number? Do you sometimes think, oh my God, I'm so rich now?

• 42:35Speaker 03

  I mean, I feel fortunate that we've been able to build a company to, to be something that is valuable, that other people think is, is worth, you know, is a valuable entity. And the real thing that I value is that the, the valuation is set through investment. And the fact that people have invested in us has given us resources to build big things in the future and to not think day to day like, how are we doing this quarter? Or how are we doing, you know, this week? And think, be able to think much more long-term and say, we can, we, what are things going to be like in two years? In five years? And how do we build towards that? And you can't do that unless you have a high valuation and people willing to invest lots of, lots of money.

• 43:19Guy Raz?

  How much of your success and what's happened to you and the creation of BuzzFeed is due to your brilliance and talent and hard work? And how much of it is luck?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  I don't know that people's self-knowledge on these things is the best knowledge. I think that in general, there's a huge amount of luck. I think there's also this concept of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, who runs, you know, Facebook, partly, he gets smarter by running Facebook. So like, once you have some initial success, you get access to people and ideas and data that allow you to synthesize things. And so, I think that is also, you know, really important. And then, if you can grow something 7% every month, you can double it every year. And if you do that for a few years, 10x is the size of that. And so, if you stay at something long enough, and you learn as you're doing it, and you

• 44:15Speaker 03

  prove as you do it, a little bit of initial luck can be turned into something much bigger over time. But there's a huge amount of luck and privilege and opportunity of where you're born and how you, you know, and I think that is a prominent thing.

• 44:32Guy Raz?

  You know, I think for a lot of people hearing this story, it would sound very seamless. Jonah, you know, does this viral thing with Nike, and then, he gets connected to the people who start Huffington Post, and then that happens, and then he's able to start BuzzFeed, and BuzzFeed just scales. What is it about startups that either you didn't understand, or other people that you talked to about startups don't understand?

• 45:01Speaker 03

  What, like, it's harder than it looks, is the kind of thing?

• 45:06Guy Raz?

  Is it? I mean, is that right?

• 45:08Speaker 03

  It is very, it is hard, yeah, it's really hard. I think you have to love the fact that it's hard. First of all, in terms of the money question you're asking, it's not a good way to make a lot of money. Sometimes, people are fortunate and make a lot of money in startups, but most of them fail. And when I think about the New York tech scene and the people that I knew over the years, lots of really smart, creative people put so much effort into building startups that, for various reasons, often outside of their control, didn't succeed.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  And so you have to love it and you have to love the struggle and you have to love that it's hard, building something new and having lots of competition and having people doubt what you're doing and having big incumbents trying to, you know, hire your people or take your business. And it's hard. I mean, it requires being really liking to do hard things and to push against struggle. I think when you think about any worthwhile endeavor, though, it's hard. Like exercising, if you want to get in shape, it's like, it's hard, you know, or, you know, playing video games. Like, you know, certain levels are really hard. Like, does anyone here play video games? I mean, and like with video

• 46:24Speaker 03

  games, if you started on level 26, it would be terrible. You would just like get destroyed, right? But if you play your way up to level 26, then it's fun that it's so hard.

• 46:38Guy Raz?

  Jonah Peretti, co-founder of BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Thank you.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 46:52Guy Raz?

  By the way, in 2015, a BuzzFeed reporter in New York tracked down his lost iPhone to a rural village in China. The reporter flew there, he met the new owner of the phone, the two men became friends. That story and the photos were posted in a blog on BuzzFeed that went viral. The two of them then went on a tour of China and eventually made it onto the Ellen DeGeneres Show. And soon, their story will become a feature film, co-produced by BuzzFeed and Ellen DeGeneres. How is that for meta?

• 47:32Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for listening to the show this week. We recorded this episode in front of a live audience at the SVA Theater in New York on July 12. Special thanks to Ali Prescott and Jessica Goldstein at NPR for all of your help. This episode was produced by Ramtin Arablouei, who also composed the music. Neva Grant makes it all come together. Thanks also to Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers, and our intern Lawrence Wu. Stay tuned for more live episodes this summer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  I'm Linda Holes.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  And I'm Stephen Thompson. There's more stuff to watch and read these days than any one person can get to. That's why we make Pop Culture Happy Hour.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Twice a week, we sort through the nonsense, share reactions, and give you the lowdown on what's worth your precious time and what's not. Find Pop Culture Happy Hour on the NPR ONE app or wherever you get your podcasts.