| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: Netflix’s eager new friend? The NFL |
| • The Top 5: Tech’s favorite microconferences and private summits |
| • Plus, our Recommendations: an artworld mystery involving Dali, Basquiat and Haring; real talk about talking better; and a pair of detectives with unusual charm |
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| Let’s spend a moment to discuss one of the hardest things to do well: quit. |
| It’s an act we generally demonize. Ours is a culture that treasures absurd perseverance. We’ll do anything to avoid an end and prolong ourselves—whether that means ingesting a drawful of supplement tablets, sticking our mugs under a red-light mask or finding a young child for a plasma swap. It’s also why so many founders these days want super-voting shares in their company, which grant them an ever-lasting influence over their business. |
| And it’s why I think one of the most notable people in tech at the moment is someone who just quit at a very smart moment: Jason Citron, the co-founder of Discord, the social media messaging app, who was until Wednesday the company’s CEO. |
| Discord is a decade old, still private and has been reportedly making slow IPO preparations for years. Citron’s decision to step down seems like a rather obvious sign that he had the self-awareness to know he didn’t want to be a public company CEO. And good on him. Running a public company is a starkly different task than managing a private startup—for any number of reasons, including the fact that a public CEO usually must get up in public at least once a quarter and justify his or her actions. Still, too many founders hang on long past an IPO and get motivated to leave only by a crashing stock price. |
| I got to know Citron a bit a few years ago when I wrote about a shift the company was taking to broaden itself beyond being a messaging app for gamers. This was in 2020, and our relationship was limited by the screens between us—a daunting restriction for all communication then—but even then it was pretty clear that Citron was a guy who didn’t like to talk about himself or his company with outsiders. Which is exactly what a public CEO has to do over and over and over again. (He wouldn’t comment for this column.) |
| At Discord, Citron wasn’t a note-perfect CEO. He and the company got caught flatfooted in 2017 when it became clear Discord had become a favorite tool of the alt-right, and Discord’s attempt to market itself to a broader audience didn’t go very well, with it mostly reversing course back to its core users last year. (I’m very curious to see what its eventual IPO filing reveals about the company’s recent growth. And, yes, if the filing shows Citron is leaving because everything is falling apart rather than through a laudable act of self-restraint, I’ll have to eat some of these words.) |
| Still, Citron’s decision to quit—and entrust his company to someone presumably better suited to guiding it forward, Activision Blizzard’s Humam Sakhnini—is one I think more of us should think about. If nothing else, his current investors might thank him for the humility. |
| Techno-optimists’ Greatest Fear |
| “Black Mirror” is back, and it’s annoying a certain set of techies who think Netflix’s dystopian sci-fi anthology series unfairly casts technology in a negative light. More than a few have suggested someone should do “White Mirror,” a show about how technology is wonderful, a much-needed buttress to the billions of dollars Silicon Valley spends on advertising each year, I guess. |
| But, gosh, how thinskinned can you get? The self-serious grumpiness over the show’s point of view brings to mind the term “snowflakes.” Neither group can take a joke! |
| Honestly, everyone should try to better emulate Netflix’s self-confident good humor. After all, one of the better episodes in the latest season, “Common People”—I recommend “Eulogy” with Paul Giamatti, too—is about a villainous corporation that constantly upsells its life-saving … subscription service. Sound familiar?—Abram Brown |
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| Everyone has a set of Christmas Day traditions. At my house, each tag on a present is inscribed with a clue as to what’s inside; pancakes with maple syrup from the farm near my parents get made around 1 p.m.; and then, last year, Beyoncé showed up. She was the much-watched halftime entertainment for the Houston Texas-Baltimore Ravens game shown on Netflix, one of two games the streamer had on Christmas—the very first NFL matches ever aired by Netflix. |
| The NFL would like it if its Christmas Day games became as much of an annual thing as those flapjacks. Netflix agrees and will air two games again this year, but as our Sahil Patel reports in our latest Big Read, what the NFL would really like is if many, many more football games aired on Netflix, a stark reflection of how radically tech, media and sports have been ordered in recent years. It was once unthinkable to picture a NFL game appearing anywhere but on a traditional TV network, but those businesses are fading and likely can’t afford to pay what the price tags the NFL—and many other sports leagues—want to put on future media-rights deals. |
| “We’re now in a world where there are some platforms that by doing one deal, you tap into global scale,” the NFL’s chief media and business officer, Brian Rolapp, told Sahil. “Netflix is one of them. Amazon is certainly becoming that, and YouTube is certainly becoming that.” |
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| If anyone ever liked the big back-slapper networking events, that’s definitely not the case anymore. We live in the era of the “microconference” and the private summit: The industry elite of today prefer to do their networking among small groups—usually at some far-flung location. Sri Muppidi and I lift the curtain on this world, which includes Patrick Collison’s Frontier Camp and Peter Thiel’s Hereticon. We also heard great things about the week-long fly-fishing trips that Allen & Co. puts on in Cody, Wyoming. |
| Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, covets an invitation to a Chandrilan wedding. Reach him at abe@theinformation.com. |
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| Listening: “Forgotten Fantasy” (DreamCrew) |
| Do you like high art—do you like mystery? Counter-culture rebellion? I see many of you nodding along: It’d be impossible not to. The saga of the Luna Luna exhibit contains all of these elements. In 1987, Austrian artist André Heller staged what he described as the world’s first art amusement park. (He called it Luna Luna as a nod to Luna Park in Coney Island, the world’s very first amusement park, which opened in 1903.) Heller filled his fantasy land with able help: Salvador Dali, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney and Keith Haring. It opened for three months—then vanished. “Forgotten Fantasy” explains what happened, a tale nimbly narrated by Helen Molesworth, the much-respected former curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and brings us into the present, where Luna Luna was recently unearthed and restaged at The Shed in Manhattan (and previously in Los Angeles). I saw the New York City exhibit a few months ago—it is wild. Alas, they’ve closed it already: I suspect possibly for a tour someplace else. Absolutely see it if you can; meantime, this pod will hold you over.—A.B. |
| Reading: “Talk” by Alison Wood Brooks |
| Usually, Alison Wood Brooks commences her beloved Harvard Business School class on communication and negotiation with an exercise that may seem tedious: She asks students to sit down and plan responses to a couple conversation topics. They’re fun—but they do require at least a little thinking: “If you could teleport anywhere, where would you go?” and “What movie or TV character do you think you’d be best friends with?” When students show up to class, they do Chat Circle, cycling through five short, timed conversations using these prompts. (My answers: Camps Bay in Cape Town, South Africa—and Natasha Rockwell’s Belinda from “The White Lotus.”) |
| Many times, the students worry the preparation will make the experience stilted or awkward. Yet nearly all of them later say they enjoyed the prepped convos compared to impromptu ones they also complete. And, naturally, Wood Brooks, a behavioral scientist by education, has reams of data to underline the point. |
| Wood Brooks recounts this routine in “Talk,” an enlightening guide to something everyone does but very few master: talk. Helpfully, she condenses her advice to an acronym—yep, you guessed it! That would be “T.A.L.K.” or “topics, asking, levity and kindness.” (Obviously, her discussion of Chat Circle falls under the first category.) |
| To generalize, T.A.L.K is a language involving more consideration and mindfulness, and fluent speakers can ably weigh what they say in the moment and what they plan to say. With practice, the technique turns everyday dialogue into something resembling a virtuosic performance, Wood Brooks argues. She describes the ideal conversation by borrowing Wynton Marsalis’ description of jazz: as an exchange in which “you accept the decisions of others. Sometimes you lead, sometimes you follow, but you can’t give up, no matter what.”—A.B. |
| Watching: “The Chelsea Detective” (AcornTV) |
| Any fan of police procedurals—and given the plethora of them, there must be a lot of such people—knows the standard cliches of the genre. The lead detective is typically a) so cantankerous that they constantly feud with their always-stupid or managing-up bosses b) a drunk c) a drug addict d) all of the above. Those traits usually are only overcome by their sheer genius at ferreting out the murderer. |
| The two leads in “The Chelsea Detective,” a three-year old British drama, are, thankfully, free of most of these tiresome shortcomings. The male lead, played by Adrian Scarborough, lives on a houseboat and rides his bike to work (signaling religiously) and is recently separated from his wife—amicably, it seems. The female lead, initially played by Sonita Henry but replaced in later seasons, is a new mother with a doting husband. |
| The charm of the show is in their ability to work together to solve crimes. To be fair, the crimes are sometimes a little far-fetched, but then that’s the nature of things in police procedurals these days (except for the French standard-setter “Spiral”). “The Chelsea Detective” is a breath of fresh air in a category that has become suffocatingly repetitive.—Martin Peers |
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| No, no—please, everyone keep going. We insist. |
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