Code Conference 2019

Editor’s note, February 2: On Tuesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he plans to step down to become executive chair of the company and that longtime executive Andy Jassy will take over as CEO of Amazon later this year. Jassy, a 23-year Amazon veteran who heads the retail giant’s cloud computing business AWS, was interviewed by Recode co-founder Kara Swisher onstage at Recode’s 2019 Code Conference.

This interview offers insights into Jassy’s views on privacy, criticisms surrounding the company’s controversial facial recognition technology, and what role the government should play in regulating technology. That last topic will likely be a focus for Jassy when he starts leading the $1 trillion company — Amazon has recently faced increasing antitrust scrutiny and questions of whether its businesses should be broken up. That scrutiny is expected to continue under a Biden administration.

Politicians and the public are increasingly skeptical of Big Tech, but do Facebook and Google deserve the techlash? Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says “deserve” isn’t the right word.

“When you have platforms that have a billion-plus people on them, you’re going to get a lot of the good in society but also on something to that scale, you’re going to see some of the bad,” Sachs said on the latest episode of Recode Decode. “It’s not a question of deserve. It’s one of the functions of building a big, powerful platform that has a lot of positive impact. There are other things that come with it. It’s your job to evolve.”

“We live in extremely unequal and frankly inequitable times,” says Rockefeller Foundation president Raj Shah. But Shah, who previously worked with US Aid and Bill and Melinda Gates, says he’s optimistic about the long-term future.

“I am an optimist today because I believe most people in Washington and around this country want to live in a more fair and more just world, are willing to work together to get there, and they need leaders who will honor that and bring out those tendencies as opposed to the tendencies that tend to tear us apart,” he said on the latest episode of Recode Decode.

Ev Williams, CEO of the publishing platform Medium, may be best known for co-founding social media giant Twitter. But he sometimes misses simpler times on the internet, when people didn’t seek out instant retweets, “Likes,” and comments.

“Part of the beautiful thing about blogging was you were always looking for feedback but you didn’t get it as momentarily — things could marinate,” said Williams, who was speaking onstage at Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Tuesday with Vox founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein. “Now, there’s an addiction to short-term feedback that is detrimental sometimes to thought.”

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the Boeing 737 Max 8 scandal was “unthinkable” for the aviation industry — but he’s still standing by Boeing.

Delta’s fleet never included the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes that were involved in two deadly crashes, but the Atlanta-based company has plenty of other Boeing planes. Bastian is willing to vouch for their safety.

A change Apple recently made to kids apps in its App Store is negatively impacting the Public Broadcasting Service, and the nonprofit broadcaster’s chief executive isn’t happy about it.

Paula Kerger, PBS’ longest-serving president and CEO, told Recode’s Peter Kafka at the 2019 Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Tuesday that PBS Kids streaming apps will be adversely affected by new restrictions Apple is placing around third-party analytics for apps for children.

The finance startup SoFi still won’t confirm that its name will adorn a new football stadium in Inglewood, California, that will be the home of the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers. But it is beginning to explain why an unusual deal like this would make sense.

Onstage at Code Conference on Tuesday, Anthony Noto, the CEO of SoFi, said that — hypothetically, of course — the company might want to get into naming because it would be a smart way to market SoFi to the millennial customers it is trying to attract and retain.

“Five to seven years ago when I was in government and I’d come to the Valley and visit with CEOs and companies, there was this explicitly stated assumption that ‘because we’re at Facebook, we’re saving the world,’” Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah told the audience at Code Conference on Tuesday. “They don’t say that now.”

Now that Silicon Valley is facing a critical reckoning of sorts, the head of the 100-year-old charity said that Silicon Valley needs to rethink how it does good for society.

Russian Doll will be back for a second season on Netflix.

Cindy Holland, vice president of original content at Netflix, and Natasha Lyonne, the co-creator, writer, director, and star of the show, made the announcement onstage with Recode’s Kara Swisher at the 2019 Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Tuesday.

The so-called “Trump bump” was real for the New York Times — but it didn’t last long, and it was overblown in the first place, according to the newspaper’s publisher.

In an interview with Recode’s Peter Kafka at the 2019 Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Tuesday, A.G. Sulzberger, who became publisher of the Times in January 2018, acknowledged that the public’s interest in all things Donald Trump was good for business. But only for a while. After Trump was sworn into the presidency, readers’ appetite for news about him “petered off” pretty quickly, Sulzberger said, and people have become tired of reading about presidential politics and politics in general.

Three people who have held senior roles at big tech companies all think that their former employers deserve more regulation — and maybe even to be broken up.

In an interview with The Verge Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton at the Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on Tuesday, former leaders at Google, Facebook, and Twitter each voiced their concerns now that they’re on the outside looking in.

In the past year, many major tech companies such as Amazon, Palantir, Salesforce, and Microsoft have come under scrutiny for selling software to US federal immigration agencies. That’s because those agencies have been responsible for enforcing some of the controversial immigration policies that separate families at the border, detain children, and deport people seeking refuge back to dangerous places.

Jonathan Ryan, CEO of immigrant legal aid and services organization RAICES, and Erika Andiola, the organization’s chief advocacy officer, are making the case that tech companies need to realize the moral consequences of the industry’s complicity — and their ability to stop what many view is blatantly unethical treatment of refugees.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon thinks Uber will be just fine despite its less-than-stellar post-IPO performance since it went public in May. It just needs a little time, just like Facebook and Google did after they first went public.

The fact that “for five minutes in time, Uber went public and it’s trading a little bit below its IPO,” is the wrong way to look at the ride-sharing company’s performance, Solomon told Recode’s Kara Swisher and Teddy Schleifer at the 2019 Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Tuesday. “We’ve been an investor in Uber for a long time and we’ve done very well. Maybe that’s the lens that we should be looking through,” he said.

It’s the holiday season for data nerds: That is, Mary Meeker is delivering her annual Internet Trends Report — the most highly anticipated slide deck in Silicon Valley — again at Code Conference 2019.

The general partner at venture capital firm Bond Capital delivered a rapid-fire 333-page slideshow that looked back at every important internet trend in the last year and looked forward about what these trends tell us to expect in the year ahead. The “Queen of the Internet” and former Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner touched on everything from accelerating internet ad spend in the US to the growth of digital delivery services in Latin America.

“This year, this week, it was unfortunate,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says. “We managed to upset everybody and we’re working really hard to try to do the right thing.”

Speaking with Recode’s Peter Kafka at the 2019 Code Conference, Wojcicki looked back on YouTube’s messy resolution to a dispute between conservative commentator Steven Crowder and Vox journalist Carlos Maza, saying YouTube made the right decision but was unintentionally “hurtful to the LGBTQ community.” More generally, she said it’s better for the platform to continue reviewing potentially controversial videos after they’re published — not before.

When Medium founder and CEO Ev Williams co-founded Twitter back in 2006, he had no idea how powerful — for better or worse — the platform would become. Now, the man who helped coin the term “blogger” is worried about the digital landscape he’s helped create.

That’s something Vox founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein will discuss with Williams on stage at Recode’s Code Conference this year.

PBS has been a political football for years, and with Donald Trump in the White House, it’s only gotten more complicated for the public broadcasting channel. Some Republicans seem hell-bent on defunding it, even though the coverage it does is more important now than ever.

Paula Kerger, president and CEO of PBS, and Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, will speak to Recode’s Peter Kafka at Code Conference on Tuesday. They’ll discuss what it’s like to cover politics with a White House that often lies and a president who decries any negative coverage as fake news. They’ll also talk about where PBS fits in in an era when video is becoming increasingly controlled by a handful of major corporations, including Comcast, AT&T, Amazon, Netflix and Apple.

When Anthony Noto took over as the new CEO of SoFi in March 2018, the online lending startup was in crisis.

Noto, who will speak onstage at Code Conference on Tuesday, was replacing the company’s founder Mike Cagney, who resigned over reports of managers sexually harassing female colleagues without repercussions; a brutal workplace culture; and, as Cagney only admitted later, his affairs with subordinates.

Raj Shah is a spokesman for the power of philanthropy to change the world as the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, the 100-year-old charity giant that oversees $3.7 billion in assets.

But never before has Shah’s job been so difficult. That’s because the conversation around big-money philanthropy has changed drastically in even just the last two years, with a new conversation taking hold about whether the rich are actually doing good in the world with their supposedly magnanimous commitments to charity. At a time of gross income inequality around the world, is private-sector philanthropy really the best leveler of economic fortunes?

If you’re a fan of shows like Russian Doll, Stranger Things, or Sex Education — you should thank Cindy Holland, vice president of original content at Netflix. Holland is the behind-the-scenes dealmaker responsible for expanding Netflix’s fiefdom of binge-worthy entertainment.

Of course, none of these programs would be possible without creative talent such as Emmy-nominated Natasha Lyonne, co-creator, writer, director and star of the critically lauded, fan-favorite series Russian Doll.

It wasn’t that long ago that serious people had real questions about the future of the New York Times, which looked like it might falter for the same reasons many newspapers have struggled over the past couple of decades.

Those questions look largely answered: The Times’ financial footing looks stable, thanks to a transformation from an advertising-based business to one supported by subscribers. Its journalism appears to be newly invigorated and is more essential than ever. And the paper seems to have adapted to the digital world quite nicely — perhaps you’ve heard of The Daily — while would-be digital rivals have struggled.

RAICES, or the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, is a Texas-based nonprofit that’s been providing free legal aid to immigrants for decades. But you probably only heard about the organization when last year it made history for being the recipient of the largest-grossing crowdfunding campaign in Facebook’s history.

In light of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, two former Facebook employees set up a campaign that raised more than $20 million to help RAICES provide legal aid and services to families separated at the border.

Since last fall, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has been running one of the largest investment banks in the world.

The Wall Street veteran and part-time EDM DJ (who reportedly used his musical side gig to win business with Spotify) is set to speak with Recode’s Kara Swisher and Teddy Schleifer at this year’s Code Conference.

Last year, Stacey Abrams ran a historic race for governor of Georgia, winning more votes than any other Democrat who has run for statewide office in the state’s history. She lost to her Republican opponent in a highly disputed outcome, with some alleging that widespread voter suppression benefitted her opponent.

Now, Abrams is campaigning to fight voter suppression — but she says it’s not about her. It’s about protecting all Americans’ right to vote.

According to one of Twitter’s top executives, there’s no denying that social media platforms can, in some cases, help radicalize people.

“I think that there is content on Twitter and every [social media] platform that contributes to radicalization, no doubt,” said Vijaya Gadde, who is Twitter’s top legal counsel and oversees its policy arm, as well as its health and safety efforts. “I also think we have a lot of mechanisms and policies in place that we enforce very effectively that combat this,” she added.