For the last two years, one question has come up more in interviews, all hands, and one-on-ones than any other:

Why did you join SmartNews?

Like Lady MacBeth’s choice of emphasis on “we fail”, there’s a lot lurking in this question. Why did you join SmartNews? Why did you join SmartNews? Why did you join SmartNews?

It’s pretty simple: because journalism matters

Taking my shot at News

The theme of my career is building new things when technology changes. A Magic the Gathering arcade game as the first 3D accelerators appeared. Road Rash as consoles replaced arcade. Second Life as broadband and graphics cards made a streaming virtual world possible. Mobile transition at Facebook as smartphones transformed how we connect to each other and information. New interface, privacy controls, and strategy work at Google as AI started to change everything.

Throughout the last twenty years, other transformations have been building -– ones my work creating the modern mobile feed at Meta likely contributed to –- the loss of trust in media and the collapse of news experiences into filter bubbles, misinformation, polarization, and doom scrolling. Misaligned incentives around news, attention, traffic, and advertising is a much larger – and older – phenomenon than Big Tech, of course, but I’ve always hoped technology should be able to do more to address misalignment.

When I went to Google, Sundar and I discussed taking on news but ultimately found more urgent problems. My Tech Advisor role meant, in addition to my day jobs, I was constantly digging into the technical and strategic implications of LLMs and GenAI. So it felt serendipitous when Ken pinged me.

We connected over the moment of transition we were in. The importance of a healthy news ecosystem to democracy, the potential impacts – for good and ill – of generative AI, the unique position of aggregators within news discovery. Kaisei and I nerded out over modern mobile technology and building for multiple markets, particularly while trying to crack as challenging a news market as the United States.

More importantly, we agreed on what is missing from contemporary news: healthy shared experiences, ranking systems resistant to polarization and capture by outrage, and a chance to rebuild trust by efficiently delivering a high quality, complete view of what’s most important to people – and why a startup might have the flexibility and ability to deliver it.

How could I not jump at this chance?

Two years later

So, almost two years ago, I joined SmartNews as CTO, spent a day with the team in Palo Alto, and headed to Tokyo for a month. I’ve spent about a third of my time since at our office in Shibuya. What an adventure! I’ve never felt more welcomed by an organization and never felt like I had more to learn.

We’ve been busy. Multiple internal and external experiments exploring how people reacted to quality news compared to conventional ranking. Creating the Arc platform: a modern mobile stack engineered to deliver content via an entirely new understanding and delivery pipeline built entirely on agentic AI. Wrapping all that technology in a product that fundamentally rethinks attention and ranking. It’s a delight to return to for daily reading and to understand the whole story.

So why did I come to SmartNews? To build NewsArc. To play a part in creating something that fundamentally improves a key pillar of our society. Because journalism still matters.