Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (24 page)

I leveraged my experience as the host of “Facebook Live” to secure a spot on the famous red carpet at the Golden Globes, as their official online correspondent. Prior to the event, I sourced some questions from the show’s Facebook audience that would be asked, live, of the attendees and broadcast over Facebook. As usual, the Internet audience came through with some interesting questions. When Paul McCartney passed, instead of asking him the standard questions about his outfit, I yelled out, “Paul! What’s your high score on Beatles Rock Band?!” He laughed and said it was definitely the most creative question he had been asked all day.

Later, when James Cameron passed, his eyes lit up when I asked him to explain to the Internet viewers some of the tech specs behind the new cameras he had invented to make
Avatar.
I felt particularly ready for this moment, since I had spent the previous day interviewing a fake “James Cameron” while media training with the talented CEO of Clarity Media Group, Bill McGowan.

Later on, I got to walk the red carpet myself and by coincidence was trailing Dana Brunetti, producer of
The Social Network,
which had come out that year. I thought it would be pretty funny if I could get a picture with my brother’s movie alter ego. But before I could make that happen, the cast came up to me and asked to have their photo taken with me!

It was all happening, and it continued right up until that fateful day when Obama came to Facebook, using my little hackathon project, “Facebook Live,” to speak to all of America.

My little broom closet media company taught me some very important lessons about the future of media. The most important lesson was that knowing how to navigate and use social media was to be its own special kind of expertise and an essential one for journalists and broadcasters in the future. I also saw that the online etiquette around journalism was changing rapidly. In a world where people can finally yell back at the television and be heard, those on the screen better be prepared to listen. It’s no longer enough to be a pretty face reading lines off a teleprompter. In the new connected world, the teleprompter talks back at you. The media correspondent of the future will need to have a new kind of skill set: the ability to be a correspondent, a community manager, a curator, and a member of the audience, all at the same time.

This will not be an easy task to accomplish. It will be a very difficult transition from everything the television industry is currently used to. Anchors will have to anchor more than just the one newsroom they’re sitting in and become proficient at monitoring a social media stream for commentary on the proceedings. Media companies will have to start fostering a bench of talent who can do this.

People watching television news no longer want just a well-groomed face reading the day’s headlines from cue cards. They want someone who is part of the dialogue they also have access to all over the Internet. This needs to be a person who is also willing to go off camera and engage with his or her followers, someone who cuts above the clutter with his or her own point of view.

Since the rise of social media has made the crews that run television much leaner than they used to be, this anchor of the future will need to have some video-editing and production experience. The budgets are smaller, and the time frames are shorter. With a skeleton crew, that anchor will need to get everything done in a tenth of the time.

The Internet has given birth to a whole new middle layer of content, people who want to be heard for five minutes on a topic they’re passionate about and may not have much else to say beyond that. If before there were only the professional broadcasters and everyone else, there is now that middle layer—the semi-pro bloviators, if you will—thousands of people who have something very valuable to say on a single topic, but not on every topic. These are the microprofessionals and opinion proclaimers that populate aggregation websites like
The Huffington Post
. These are the “guest posters” on your favorite sites across the Internet. Entire media companies are being built on the backs of people who have something interesting or provocative to say in five to eight hundred words and then immediately retreat back into obscurity.

There is an overflow of companies in Silicon Valley all threatening to “disrupt” television, all cluttering the experience of watching TV with an array of apps that are more third rate than second screen. Television doesn’t need to be disrupted by Silicon Valley; it needs to be embraced and enhanced.

We have entered this interesting new world where every person and brand needs to think of itself as a media company, as a content creator with a sharing strategy. For example, Starbucks will spend millions of dollars on advertisements to potentially reach their customers on morning TV shows, such as
Morning Joe
. But Starbucks has so many followers on Facebook alone that any message they broadcast on the Facebook platform will reach more people than a similar advertisement on every single morning show combined.

An online platform gives companies direct access to millions more accessible, demographically identifiable individuals following them on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. There’s no reason that Starbucks or JCPenney or Macy’s or any number of other companies shouldn’t make their own morning shows and broadcast to their followers on the Internet.

In the early days of television, brands directly sponsored shows all the time, and the price of doing so was tremendously high. Now, the cost of bandwidth has fallen so low that, if a brand were willing and had the capacity to produce some kind of original content, that brand could get a tremendous bang for its buck by going directly to the audience. Heck, the “soap opera” was born out of product placement.

Social media provide brands with a good deal of specific information about their audience. There’s no reason brands couldn’t leverage that information to produce better content for their audiences. Would people watch the “Starbucks Coffee Morning Hour” on their Facebook page? Why not? Especially if it was entertaining and did the work that a lot of TV morning shows need to do, which is be informative without being too overbearing.

And it’s not just brands that must be their own media companies. The same holds true for individual artists. Just as everyone has the potential to be his or her own publicist, celebrities also have to be their own publicists, promoters, directors, and ticket agents. Recently, the comedian Louis C. K. made headlines by skirting the standard distribution channels by selling his own tickets and distributing his material online himself.

Not only that, but celebrities can also tap into the Internet to fund their projects in ways that were never possible. After an entire
Veronica Mars
movie was funded through donations on Kickstarter, Zach Braff was able to crowdfund a film in only three days.

The new producers can be everyday people. And the people want to be heard.

When I got the chance to create my own new media company, I took note of what I had learned from my experiences at “Facebook Live” and set out to change the way media and pop culture interacted with each other. All it took was an Icelandic volcano, a small broom closet, and a dream.

TV Still Matters

One of my first goals when I left Facebook was to produce a television show featuring the lives of people in Silicon Valley. I knew that, notwithstanding the rise of Internet-based media, TV still mattered a lot and was the driving force behind pop culture. Even though I was creating an Internet-based media company, I couldn’t just upload a few videos to YouTube and call it a day. If I had done that, nobody would have paid any attention to the show. There were still Emmys to win, more audiences to capture, and more work to be done on television.

Even as the distinction between TV and the Internet lessens, TV is still the dominant force driving the narrative, curating the content, and shaping the culture. In 2013, the Pew Research Center’s annual
State of the News Media
report showed that when asked where they got their news “yesterday,” over 50 percent of Americans said via television, while only 39 percent said via online or a mobile device.

I know I’m expected to say, “Forget Hollywood. Digital is coming to eat your lunch!” But I don’t think that’s true. I think New York, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley are going to share the meal, and there’s enough food to go around. Even YouTube puts out a press release every time a show that began on their platform makes the leap to TV. That, in and of itself, is evidence that TV still matters. If at one time TV was the only source of content, at least now it also serves as a curator.

There is still the common assumption that, if something was really good, it’d be on TV. Maybe that will change in an era of Netflix-produced content, but it hasn’t changed yet.
House of Cards,
Netflix’s in-house drama starring Kevin Spacey, cost $100 million to produce and was truly a breakthrough moment for premium content online. In the meantime, getting a show on TV was a way for my company to get the stamp of approval from the status quo powers that be and break through the noise.

Even though I had come from Facebook, I found that people in Hollywood weren’t taking me as seriously as I had hoped. They saw me as “one of those Internet video people,” and one person even commented that “it’s cute what you guys are doing down there,” even though last time I checked San Francisco was north of Los Angeles. It was hard to get the appropriate meetings, but I was determined to prove them wrong. It was always a dream of mine to produce a television show, even though it seemed like a dream that had a very small chance of coming true.

Who would have thought that the opportunity would come to me via reality TV?

In the fall of 2011, I found out through the grapevine (and some very diligent work by my colleague Erin Kanaley) that Bravo was casting a Silicon Valley reality show. We reached out to get more information. Bravo responded enthusiastically, offering me a part on camera, in the cast of the show. I thought about it for a hot minute and then declined. I may have lost the Emmy to Anderson Cooper, but I was not ready to become a reality TV star.

Bravo came back with an interesting proposal. They had been looking for someone in Silicon Valley to sign on as executive producer—would I be interested in that? The more I thought about it, the more I saw that this show could be the foot in the door to Hollywood that I had been looking for. After all, it’s not every day that, if your goal is to create a television show, one just suddenly appears out of nowhere and falls into your lap.

A few months later, Bravo announced
Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,
a reality show that followed the experiences of six entrepreneurs and shined a light on tech culture, and my participation as executive producer. Soon after inking the deal, we went into production. In true start-up form, I learned as we went along.

As with the best of the genre, our reality show had deep interpersonal drama, hard workers who also threw legendary parties, and your standard mix of fun, craziness, money, and love, all jammed into this zany community called Silicon Valley.

We had a huge amount of buzz leading up to the premiere. This was the year of the Facebook IPO. Tech accelerators and incubators were popping up all over the country, and talk was in the air about “bubbles” and “series A crunches.” Building on this zeitgeist, it made perfect sense to combine the fun, watchable drama of reality TV with the nation’s growing fascination with the technology community.

Not all the buzz was positive. In fact, there was plenty of push-back right away.

After working at Facebook, my decision to work in the “old media” of television seemed like a betrayal to the entirety of “new media.” Some tech bloggers took me out to the woodshed for daring to make a reality show about Silicon Valley that showed pretty people having a good time, instead of the “reality” of Silicon Valley—presumably a guy sitting in an open-office layout, typing on a laptop for ten hours, then passing out in a luxury shuttle van and drooling all over his hoodie.

I guess the fact that the show aired on Bravo wasn’t a strong enough hint that this wasn’t intended to be a gritty CNBC-style documentary. Perhaps these same writers would criticize the
Real Housewives of New Jersey
for failing to accurately portray the difficulty of getting grime off shower tiles and making a nice roast before the husband comes home.

Anyway, whether the buzz was positive, negative, comedic, or downright hateful, everyone was talking about it. When we became a trending topic on Twitter the night before the 2012 presidential election, I was ecstatic.

Unfortunately, we did not see a correlation between the insane buzz and our actual ratings, which started high but then dropped and remained disappointingly low.

I think the problem with our show was that it was too techie for the reality crowd and too much reality for the tech crowd. Just as venture capitalists caution start-ups to start small, delight their initial users, and grow, we would have benefited from picking one audience and delighting it. In hindsight, I think we needed to do a show that either targeted people with very little knowledge of tech, and used Silicon Valley as just a backdrop, or targeted people interested in tech entrepreneurship, and went much deeper into start-up life, filming more in start-up offices, showing cofounder dynamics, the pressures of competition, the perks, and so on. We took a middle ground, trying to appeal to both audiences and wound up not delighting anyone.

Regardless of the final numbers, I know
Start-Ups: Silicon Valley
had an impact. We changed the lives of our six entrepreneurs, we inspired conversations in Hollywood about more Silicon Valley–based TV shows, and I personally have heard from thousands of people who, after seeing our show, decided to pursue their dreams and either study computer science, return to grad school for entrepreneurship, take up coding, or apply to a tech incubator.

When I first got involved with this show, I said that if I could inspire even one woman in the middle of the country to pursue a career in tech, I would consider it a win. It was a win.