Anil Dash

@ems_hodge This is the best, and hardest, question. I think about it a lot. I think first, we have to really examine our assumptions and biases and be honest about them and actively work to overcome them. And that leads to the larger, broader challenge: We have to develop a culture of thoughtful, strong self-criticism. We'll write 1000-word think pieces on Medium about the font choice in a new logo but not examine whether every app we're funding ignores underserved communities or marginalized people, and that's got to change.

@yolandaenoch I think I've always been vaguely aware of it, but only over the last decade did I really make it a habit to loudly and consistently speak out. I don't have one single galvanizing moment, but I did have a turning point when I returned to NYC after a few years in SF and looked back at my career. I saw that the women (usually women of color) who had opened the door for me and given me my first big opportunities in tech had been pretty systematically pushed out of not just their *jobs* but the industry entirely. And I saw that when I looked around my neighborhood or at a party with my friends, it looked nothing like who I saw in meetings (or especially in a board room) at most companies. So I just decided, since I had access, and had already earned a certain degree of respect, that i was going to focus on raising issues of inclusion and consistently and effectively as I could.

@arishi_ Boy that's a tough one. They may be in their own league. I mean, I like Taylor Swift and obviously she's enormously popular and will remain so for the foreseeable future, but neither her songs nor her performances (lol TS dancing) seem that amazing to me? Kanye seems to see his music as almost a footnote to himself, and nobody else is even *trying* to be a superstar of the kind I grew up on in the 80s.

@bentossell Usually among the top questions is, "I know you're worried about failing, but if this succeeds as you hope it will, how will the world be better? And for whom will it be better?"

@bentossell Appreciate your hair while you still have it -- get a better haircut. And also, stop overvaluing the fact that you're a smart young guy, there a ton of smart young guys, and on average they're not very thoughtful and don't listen well. Stop being That Guy.

@jeffumbro Oh, they smell sweeter than flowers and far more intoxicating than bourbon!

@yolandaenoch No, nobody noticed it until a bit later when some tools that try to guess one's ratio of retweets by gender came around. I still only RT women/non-binary folks or institutions that have no gender; it just became a habit over the last few years.

@mrsharma @mignano Wow. This is a really deep question. I've been blogging for about 17 years, and in the early days we thought "blogs" would encompass almost all of the content sharing you're talking about. It'll never be the only thing people consume -- folks love to read books and watch movies and read magazines and even as those things go fully digital, those behaviors won't disappear. But already the majority of media we consume is social content created by other regular people, and I think that will continue to increase.

@anildash @mignano Agreed, and thank you for the insights, Anil! Hopefully in the near future we will work together.

@marius_chawa Oh, there's so much good advice. My first business partner when I was in my teens did a full-on sales training course for me, which made me understand so much more about just how to communicate in general in a business context, and to come up with solutions that help everybody involved in a conversation. So that was immensely valuable education, though I'm not sure it was "advice" per se.

@anildash were you always entrepreneurial or did you have to completely shift your mindset?

@timbeiko Tim, I really appreciate you asking the question -- that's the first step for all of us who've been very fortunate, whether by birth or by circumstance. The biggest thing someone like you or I can do is to challenge those in the room with us, the other guys (mostly straight, mostly white or asian) to think _first_ of those with the least access, the fewest advantages. We need to _start_ by making products, and an industry, that serves them, instead of making stuff for ourselves and hoping it "trickles down" to, well, the other 90% of the world.

@bluechoochoo It's hard for me to predict where mobile web is going right now. On the publishing side, we're seeing a ton of flux with Instant Articles, AMP and the like -- it feels a lot like the RSS Wars did more than a decade ago, with competing corporate concerns intersecting in odd ways with legitimate consumer desires like offline reading or faster, more responsive reading. Then there's mobile web *apps*, which seem to be going through a big reckoning, too. I can imagine some mobile frameworks (especially ones that connect to native app solutions, like React does to React Native) really starting to become mobile app defaults, in the same way that Twitter Bootstrap kind of just "won" for a certain class of relatively static sites and apps. I'm still trying to form an opinion about whether everything moves inside apps. I hope not, if only because I love the immediacy and open-endedness of the "real" (HTML) web, but we may just be on a cycle that's headed toward All App Everything. I haven't yet found something that makes people say "I want to use the web version of this, not the app version", especially as inter-app links on platforms like iOS start to get massively better.

@ems_hodge Three things? Hmm! First should be about those fundamental questions, like what is the change in the world you're trying to make by creating a product and a company. That's got to be the starting point. Two, how well are you serving your community (whether that's community of users, potential users, or the broader community you're part of?) And three is about the long-term sustainability concerns -- what does it look like if you succeed, how do you make sure to stay on track with what you're trying to achieve in the world while still paying the bills. Founders are already thinking about the bank account balance daily, so you never need to remind them of that.

@veronica For me personally, Prince is sort of my lens for understanding pop culture. He's obviously somebody hugely respected within music for his talent, but he's been just as innovative in his use of technology or his questioning of the music industry as he as been artistically, which is just extraordinary. For example, people can easily get "oh, here's a pop star who had the biggest hit song in 1984", and that's true and easy to get why someone's a fan. But for me, it's just as much about saying "those big 80s hits had a signature sound that's attributable to the Linn LM-1 drum machine, which was the first to use digital samples, and they sound unique because Prince was both the first and one of the best to ever program that kind of computer". And in that way, there's an analogy between why When Doves Cry sounds so distinctive and amazing and why Instagram was a breakout hit because it was among the first to make good use of the iPhone's hardware.

@tomstocklein No, we had the idea for Makerbase years ago, actually I think the first time Ryan told me about Product Hunt I asked if he'd do something like Makerbase because I just wanted it to exist! I think they're super complementary communities, with Product Hunt having awesome conversations like this and great tools for discovering new sites, and we're really focused on helping discover the sort of entire creative process or history behind how a great product or service gets built. We've talked loosely about finding ways to connect the two services, maybe in the future we can make that happen!

@benwerd That's a great question. I think we got maybe halfway there? We were right that dashboards weren't the right format, but (e.g.) Slack didn't yet exist, so we had to do a lot of work to deliver a stream of cards that were interesting. I think if we were starting today, ThinkUp would just be a Slack bot that sends you updates. Maybe we'll evolve that way!

@benwerd I think about this question a lot. It really depends deeply on the audience one is trying to serve. Every model requires careful thought about its costs and externalities. I think as long as you can be clear & up front about how you intend to sustain a product or service, and open with your community about what it takes to get there, then you're on the road to something more ethical. Most of the worst companies are the ones where their true intentions are obscured or they mislead people about it.

@cassidyfein It's interesting -- I think there are huge opportunities around medicine (especially in ensuring broader access and more uniform quality of care, or in addressing price discrepancies as things like Clear Health Costs do: http://clearhealthcosts.com/ ) and the same goes for security. But my background has always been pretty narrowly in consumer internet, heavily leaning toward media and social, and so I'm a little reluctant to guess what will happen in domains outside of my expertise. I do think there's a huge opportunity around better serving labor and workers -- sort of the opposite of Zenefits, designed for employees rather than employers. Come say hi next time! It's always nice to meet folks in the neighborhood. :)

@asispanda I was born in the U.S. (in Pennsylvania!) but am very proud my family is from Orissa, and glad I've gotten to visit a number of times over the years. I have always had a certain degree of ambition about my career or life, but I am not sure I define "making it big" the same way other people often do.

@wiredmau5 I constantly find myself appreciating the business and cultural analysis by Andréa Lopez, @bluechoochoo. And @bimadew is a completely amazing curator of beautiful things on the Internet.

@erictwillis This is TOO INTENSE! The answers vary by day or by mood, but certainly an all-time contender has to be "Adore", off of 1987's Sign O' The Times. One of the greatest ballads ever.

@rynfrz I don't know if I yet have advice to give anybody else. i am definitely very engaged on a day to day basis with my son and with the responsibilities of raising him. But I struggle with being a poor partner to my wife in managing the processes around that. Like a lot of dads, I think my wife is assumed by me (and the world!) to be the "default" parent, with me in a secondary (or worse, "helper" or "babysitter") role, and too often that's a convenient excuse to keep from having to take on primary responsibility for hard work that's often not glamorous or visible. So my suggestion for managing it (for people who have partners co-parenting with them, if those partners are women) would be to do better than I do, or to do what I'm trying to be better at, in taking on day-to-day domestic responsibility that is undervalued and ignored when women do it.

@anildash Thank you for the detailed response. It is certainly a challenge and something I hope we all strive to improve on. Managing the one true currency we all share, time, is by far the biggest challenge I deal with. Appreciate it!

@anildash @rynfrz this is an interesting question. i'm very entrepreneurial, my girlfriend and I are not married yet, but i wonder how we would manage that when we get married and start having kids :(

@arishi_ I think we're right in the middle of figuring this out now. I love the experience of ThinkUp -- getting a stream of insights is a far better experience than most dashboards, and we have a good sense of personality and humanity to what people. But as a product, our bigger challenges are on the business side -- it's hard to keep evolving with each of the different social networks, and very hard to grow a consumer-pay SAAS business, especially outside of any app store. I think we'll be looking at those fundamental challenges first, before making radical shifts in the daily user experience.

@leventask That's a great question. I think the first decade of my career I was so focused on just being able to pay the rent and keep a roof over my head that I didn't do enough to learn and think about others who would be impacted by the work I was doing. I regret being self-absorbed or maybe just uneducated about the kind of impact that even small decisions in tech products can have on the world.

@anildash Thanks for your reply Anil. You mean start whenever you can. Don't try to find the biggest idea. There are opportunities anytime, anywhere. Am I right?

@leventask That's certainly a big part of it, yep.

@rynfrz No, I think she's been very smart and thoughtful, particularly in the conversation that's happened *after* she posted that piece. https://medium.com/p/69ed3f150540 I think she epitomizes exactly why I'm excited about millennials and eager to see them take a leadership role in society.

@tnofuentes Easy: India. I think it has the widest variety of mangoes in the world, and all of the ones that are sentimental favorites for me. :)

@anildash yassss

@thedavidjohnson One of the things I'm most proud of is that the NYC tech scene seems to have a (thus far, unfortunately rare) genuine sense of civic responsibility. I'm on the board of the NY Tech Meetup ( https://nytm.org/ ) and we've just had this great community over the last 10 or 12 years where everybody sort of expects each other to chip in. That can be, like, after Hurricane Sandy, people going to help clean up a neighborhood, or it can be like with SOPA/PIPA where the founders of the hottest startups in the city got on a train and went down and talked to Congress to try and stop bad policy. I would love to see the Valley or other communities replicate that model of good tech leaders expecting each other to stand up and help their communities, and to really stand for some values, and that's one of the things I love most about our scene.

@anildash Great stuff, thanks!

@thedavidjohnson I think it's a little bit of both. The value of a college degree depends a ton on what one's background is, and which field one is going into. I was very fortunate my parents brought me all the way into the middle class through their hard work, so my decision about college was informed by knowing I had a safety net and some security to fall back on. Plus, being in tech, there's a slight *positive* stereotype about Indian men, at least when it comes to being coders or the like. And not starting out my adult life with a crushing burden of debt certainly helped me get started on the right foot. By contrast, not having a formal college education certainly was a weakness in terms of both my discipline around learning (the whole "learning how to learn" thing that a lot of people get from college), as well as in developing a professional social network or industry contacts. Living in NYC, I often encounter people who casually, matter-of-factly talk about how they partnered with, or got support from, people they met through college (often at Ivy League schools or other "big name" universities) and it's striking to me what a leg up that provides, *particularly* for people from underrepresented backgrounds.

@anildash Thanks for the thoughtful response. I went straight from high school into entrepreneurship and have also wondered how things might be different with a network in place, but I'd probably still be on a campus somewhere with a new major (20+ years later) because of insatiable curiosity. Cheers!