Taking Risks

The thing about taking risks is that they don’t always work out.

Two years ago, I took a risk — technically somewhere between “large” and “a flier” — to leave my role as the head of Core Experience at Google to join a startup in a country where I didn’t speak the language. Why? I’d never really lived outside of the US. I knew what was possible with LLMs and was itching to build something with them.

Moreover, the challenges around news in the United States due to polarization and attention are important and worth taking a run at. Startups — for all their risks and challenges — give space to maneuver that large companies lack.

Finally, later in your career, it’s easy to no longer do things that scare you.

So, I took the risk.

We spent two years understanding the problem, building new technologies, hiring great people, and launching a very different way to explore news. I found the early results incredibly exciting, but ultimately the company thought otherwise. We spent much of the last month working together to find ways to keep NewsArc going, but sadly, we didn’t find a way forward.

Which hurts.

If you are reading this and you’re looking for some really talented folks, drop me a line or go spelunking on LinkedIn. Whether it’s AI researchers in New York or the whole mix of skills you would expect for mobile development in Palo Alto, the NewsArc team is a group of people you’d be stoked to work with.

What it doesn’t change is the incredible adventure of the last two years. So much food, the infinite depth of Japan, building connections with an incredible group of engineers in our Tokyo office, becoming a local in Shibuya, and the joy of pushing so hard against a really challenging problem.

We built technology and a product that people really connected with and enjoyed using. It’s all too fresh to really consider next steps, but let’s be clear: news matters and conventional attention reinforcement isn’t enough.

Stay tuned for what’s next.