Author: John Battelle

Is Democracy In Peril? Yes.

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NewCo Shift Forum 2018

Four world leaders discuss the fate of democracy in North America. Put bluntly: They’re concerned.

Left to right: John Heilemann, Jorge Fernando Quiroga, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Luis Almagro and Esko Aho

Partnering with the World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid, the largest forum of former democratic leaders, the NewCo Shift Forum convened a two day workshop in February featuring world leaders from Canada, Uruguay, Latvia, Bolivia, and Finland. Four of them then joined us on stage at the main conference for a captivating conversation, hosted by John Heilemann, on the state of democracy in the United States. Given the warning on this very topic delivered by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright today, this conversation feels ever more timely.

Below is a transcript, edited for clarity, and the video of the event. I introduce the topic and the speakers first, then hand it over to Mr. Heilemann for the dialog.

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Facebook: Tear Down This Wall.

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Instead of kicking data brokers off its platform, Facebook should empower its entire user base to be their own brokers of data.

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Late last week Facebook announced it would eliminate all third-party data brokers from its platform. It framed this announcement as a response to the slow motion train wreck that is the Cambridge Analytica story. Just as it painted Cambridge as a “bad actor” for compromising its users’ data, Facebook has now vilified hundreds of companies who have provided it fuel for its core business model, a model that remains at the center of its current travails.

Why? Well, I hate to be cynical, but here’s my answer: Because Cambridge Analytica provided Facebook air cover to consolidate power over the open web. Put another way: Facebook is planning to profit from a scandal of their own making.

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Sure, The Internet Is Broken. So Let’s Go Fix It, Shall We?

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With the launch of 1.1.1.1, Cloudflare thumbs its nose at ISPs and the big platforms (AKA Google), and once again declares itself a business willing to start, and lead, tech’s toughest conversations

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince (Image)

Over the past year Cloudflare became best known not for the impressive services it has built in the Internet networking space, but for an action taken by its CEO Matthew Prince during the swirl following Trump’s Charlottesville comments. After initially defending the free speech rights of its neo-Nazi customer The Daily Stormer, Prince finally had enough. When the site claimed Cloudflare secretly supported its hateful philosophy, Prince kicked the site off the company’s network.

But it was Prince’s post on the subject that really caught everyone’s attention. From it:

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The Third Place and the Need State of Convenience

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Newco Shift Forum 2018

Kevin Johnson, CEO of Starbucks, in a wide ranging conversation on the role of an iconic retail brand in the age of Amazon

Kevin Johnson, CEO Starbucks, during NewCo Shift Forum 2018

The Starbucks brand is ubiquitous — especially for anyone who’s visited a major city around the world. But what’s less well known about the iconic company is its long term commitment to, in its CEO’s words, “redefine what it means to be a public company.” To kick off the second annual Shift Forum, we invited Kevin Johnson, CEO of Starbucks, to join us in conversation about the challenges and opportunities driving a company that, even in an age of Amazon, opens one new store somewhere in the world every four hours. Below is the video interview, in full, and a transcript, edited for clarity.

John Battelle: Please join me in welcoming Kevin Johnson. He’s got his Starbucks cup. You are on brand, brother. [laughter]

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The Weak Case Against Regulation

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Facebook faces the test of its young life. But arguments against regulation fail to understand the larger issues at play.


A scan of the past few days in FacebookLand yields nothing but bad news.

But there was a glimmer of hope in today’s news: Former Facebook board member and Zuckerberg mentor Donald Graham, once the scion of the Washington Post (that title now belongs to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), argued in an Op Ed yesterday: “Don’t Regulate Facebook.” Why? Because “regulation is political” and politics should be kept away from platforms that support free speech.

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‘If You’re Not Doing Something About It, You’re Part of the Problem’

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NewCo Shift Forum 2018

Valley legend Reid Hoffman in conversation with policy legend Janet Napolitano


A highlight of last month’s Shift Forum was a conversation between Valley legend Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and prolific investor, and Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California system and former head of Homeland Security (and former governor of Arizona).

Why pair these two? Well, Hoffman and Napolitano share a passion for policy and the intersection of technology and government, which of course was a major theme of the Forum. In the video and edited transcript below, Hoffman and Napolitano cover sexism in the workplace, immigration, gun control, and the future of work.

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Zuck Ducks the Tough Questions

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Money Quote Thursday March 22

The Facebook CEO finally spoke, but did he say anything new?

Of this, I am certain.

And….scene. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence by posting a longer than one page response on his Facebook page (that link is to COO Sheryl Sandberg’s post, so you have both), then granting several major media outlets 20 or so minutes of his time for a largely similar set of interviews. He started with a CNN interview where he apologized directly. Then he took to three publications for lengthier interviews. As you might expect, the media outlets each took a slightly different angle. Honestly, after reading them all, the whole thing felt too orchestrated and calorie free. Zuck did apologize, sort of, but he failed to do the one thing I think is most important: Admit the problem is bigger than his company’s ability to fix, ask for help, and commit to leading the charge on the larger issues at play here.

Oh, and I did try to watch the CNN interview online, but I’m not going to link to it here. Why? Because CNN made simply indefensible decision to cut his interview into minute-long soundbites, separated by as many forced ad breaks as humanly possible. That almost guarantees no one will actually view the entire interview. If ever there was an ironic proof of how Facebook is killing media outlets and damaging the concept of an informed electorate, well, there you have it.

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We Allowed This to Happen. We’re Sorry. We Need Your Help.

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What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should say next.

Iconic companies can fail (Wired cover at left, 1997, while I was managing editor, and this month at right). And iconic companies can recover. It all depends on leadership.

As I write this, I am certain of one thing: A tense and cortisol-fueled war room has convened inside Facebook headquarters, with communications, policy, and operational executives madly preparing a script soon to be read by the company’s beleaguered CEO. At some point during the scrum, some of the execs had to leave to host a company-wide all hands, but to those in the room, that was a distraction. The all hands had to happen because the natives were restless (more on that in my next piece). But at present, Facebook is in chaos, and the leadership team has no idea what the company response should truly be. So there was no way the two faces of the company — Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg — were going to be at the all hands meeting. Not a chance.

By the time I’ve finished writing this column, and certainly by the morning, we’ll finally hear from Zuckerberg on the “category five hurricane” that has hit the company over the weekend. But given the national news has already led with the story, I doubt it. More likely it’ll happen Wednesday. If it doesn’t, well, that’s another column.

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Can Government Be Nimble and the State Be Quick?

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NewCo Shift Forum 2018

Fixing government services isn’t rocket science. But it does require a fresh perspective and courageous public servants. Fortunately, Jennifer Pahlka is on the case.

Jennifer Pahlka from Code for America

Complaining about the government is easy. Doing something about it? Much, much harder. But that’s exactly what Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America and former Deputy CTO of the White House, has managed to do. In this “High Order Bit” — a short, impactful talk laddered to Shift Forum themes, Pahlka explains her life’s work. Take the time to watch this video or read the transcript, edited for clarity below. It’s both maddening and inspiring, and will leave you rooting not only for Pahlka, but for the kind of systemic change her work reveals.

Jennifer Pahlka: I’m going to jump right into a story. It in fact also covers a little bit why the California model might be a model for the rest of the country.

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What Comes After The Cloud?

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Newco Shift Forum 2018

As CTO of Adobe, Abhay Parasnis oversees the company’s technology strategy, and he’s betting big on narrow but deep AI.


Now that every business worth its stock price has moved to “the cloud,” creating massive technology winners like Salesforce, Amazon, and Google along the way, the technology industry finds itself searching once more for a metaphor that can drive its seemingly endless cycle of identifying and building the “next big thing.” And while it seems almost too obvious to identify artificial intelligence, or AI, as that next thing, Abhay Parasnis, CTO of Adobe, makes a strong case for why the received wisdom may yet prove true.

Famous for betting the company on the cloud five years ago (and winning big), Adobe is making an even bigger bet on a certain kind of AI — what Parasnis calls “narrow AI.” Adobe’s goal is to leverage narrow AI across its core suite of products in creativity, marketing services, and business services, in the process simplifying them and making them accessible to a magnitude of order more potential customers. Forget Terminator references, where a generalized AI takes over the world, Parasnis told me at the recent NewCo Shift Forum. Think instead of the magical world of Harry Potter (minus Voldemort, of course). Below is the video and full transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity.

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