Facebook: Then and Now

Later this month will mark ten years since I spoke at Facebook.

In October 2016, Facebook flew me out to their headquarters in Menlo Park to close out their Design Lecture Series for the year. I gave a talk called “Black Design Matters” where I spoke about how I started Revision Path, about diversity in design, and about some of the ways a company like Facebook could help.

I also brought my recording equipment with me, and the day before the lecture, I recorded a series of interviews with some of Facebook’s Black designers on campus.

This was huge. Part of that was because of where both Revision Path and I were in 2016. The podcast was a little over three years old, and it was growing fast. I acquired another website, started a Slack community and began hosting AMAs, launched a job board, began publishing long-form editorial work with a small crew of interns and freelance writers, launched a Patreon, and debuted a line of merch. All of these were different experiments of me scrambling to build a sustainable platform dedicated to showcasing Black designers on a shoestring budget, and the Facebook had now become a major supporter of that work.

But that trip meant so much to me because of what happened the year before.

In March 2015, I did a solo talk at SXSW called “Where Are the Black Designers?” Since SXSW didn’t let me know I was accepted until January, pretty much all the hotels were already booked and I had to now come up with at least $2,000 to get to the event in Austin, TX. My studio had just lost our biggest client, so I was damn near broke and definitely didn’t have that kinda money laying around for a last minute conference acceptance when I was still trying to make payroll. I started a GoFundMe to raise the money, and AIGA even chipped in to cover half of the cost. The campaign was a success, and I booked the cheapest plane ticket I could afford because the roach-infested Airbnb I was managed to get was almost $500 a night (and the neighbors knew it was an Airbnb and kept leaving threatening and racist notes during my stay).

Even after all that effort, the actual session was sparsely attended. I remember maybe 15 or 20 people being in a room that could hold a couple hundred. Some people wandered in to charge their phones. Some were asleep. It would have been very easy to look at that room and think nobody cared.

But one of the people who heard me speak worked at Facebook, a product design manager named Tory Hargro.

Tory, along with an invitation to Facebook’s house at SXSW that year, eventually led to Facebook financially supporting Revision Path. And now a year and a half later, I was standing inside MPK 20 giving a lecture about Black design.

Side note: When I first got on campus, Tory gave me a walking tour around part of MPK 20. At one point, we walked into the building where Instagram was based. There were a few cubicles just inside the lobby—I think they called them “stages”— and Tory asked for my phone so he could take some pictures of me in one of the stages to post on Instagram.

Me: “I’m not on Instagram.”

* record scratch *

Shortly thereafter, Revision Path joined Instagram. 😂

At the time, Facebook felt like validation. Ten years later, my feelings about Facebook (now Meta) are much more complicated, and some of that started right after that design lecture series.

The following year, Revision Path partnered with Facebook Design on an event in Atlanta. I thought of it as our first live podcast event, but Facebook saw it differently. For them, it was a recruiting event.

I wanted to invite some friends, some former guests, and people from the local design community so they could see the podcast in action…but Facebook controlled the guest list. People had to submit resumes and Facebook decided who they wanted in the room based on whether those attendees might be potential hires. The event had Revision Path's name on it, but it wasn't a Revision Path event. It was a Facebook event.

Facebook not only controlled the guest list, but the speakers as well, including adding a non-Black designer to the panel I didn’t know. I’ll never forget this part of the event. It was after the panel had concluded and I was working the room. I walked up on a group of Georgia Tech students and asked them if they enjoyed the event and what they thought about the podcast.

None of them had even heard of Revision Path before tonight.

After that, I never did another event with Facebook.

And then, of course, Facebook itself changed (or perhaps our collective understanding of Facebook changed). The Cambridge Analytica data scandal happened. The public conversation around the company became very different. Questions about privacy, misinformation, political influence, moderation, and the enormous power of social platforms became impossible to separate from the company itself.

That also meant I had to think differently about what it meant for Revision Path to have accepted Facebook's money during that time, especially since I was starting to catch heat about it from listeners and supporters.

I've been asked about that directly over the years. I don't think the useful response is to pretend I knew in 2016 everything we would learn later. I also don't think it's useful to pretend that their support didn't matter, because it absolutely did.

That's what makes remembering this complicated.

I mean, I’m grateful for what Facebook's support made possible for Revision Path, but I’m not turning that gratitude into an endorsement of everything Facebook became or everything the company did. That would be stupid.

However, I can also recognize that there was a difference between Facebook supporting Revision Path and Facebook using Revision Path to accomplish Facebook's own goals around DEI. I didn't understand that distinction as clearly in 2016 as I would later.

Over the years, the relationship between Revision Path and Facebook continued to break down. Cancelled meetings, unanswered emails, and vague communication was the norm until we fully parted ways about a year into me working at Glitch. Now there wasn’t an official reason for the split, but I’d imagine supporting a podcast produced by a company whose CEO was regularly talking shit about Mark Zuckerberg to the press didn’t help keep that relationship healthy.

On a serious note, I don't want to erase what Facebook’s support meant to me at that time.

I remember the day I got the invite to speak at Facebook and record some podcast episodes. I remember getting on that plane because it was my first time flying first class. I remember that the hotel I stayed in had a robot that delivered my room service. I remember the black car Facebook sent to drive me an hour over to Menlo Park, walking around this enormous campus, and thinking about how far Revision Path had come. How far I had come.

And yeah, I remember that empty ass room at SXSW, too. That is probably the part that stays with me the most ten years later.

You don’t always know which room matters. You can prepare like hell, raise the funds, travel across the country, stand in front of hundreds of empty chairs, give the talk, and then wonder whether any of that shit made a difference. In my case, I was lucky Tory was the one person in that room who was listening.

I couldn’t have known at SXSW where my talk would lead. I couldn’t have known where that relationship with Facebook would eventually lead either.

Ten years later, I think I’m okay with holding both of those thoughts at once.

Revision Path has ended. It ran for 550 episodes over 11 years and earned a permanent place in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, but in the end, I didn’t have the financial support to keep it going. Facebook’s money helped keep the show alive for a while. But it was never what made the show matter.

I’m grateful that someone was listening. And I’m grateful that, eventually, I learned I didn’t need Facebook to prove that the work mattered.

Store-Bought Is Fine, But Your Podcast Idea Isn't

"Maurice, we want to make a podcast."

Now I've been producing shows long enough that you'd think I'd be thrilled every time a tech company tells me that, and yet…I'm usually not. But I also have bills to pay and they have money to spend, so here we are.

I'll start by asking a few questions to get to the root of their request:

• What do you actually have to say? (they usually don't know)

• Who should be saying it? (it's usually always the CEO, because they think podcast = clout)

• Why would anyone want to hear this repeatedly? (arrogance? inability to read the market? a secret desire to be Joe Rogan?)

• And what does a podcast let you do that you couldn't do somewhere else? (cue the longest pause of the meeting)

I'm not trying to dissuade them, but after these questions, the fantasy fades pretty fast and we're left with the reality: there's no strategy behind the request. They don't really want a podcast. They want an advertisement with theme music.

Okay. Now we can get to work.

Here’s the thing: the solution to this request is almost never "make a better podcast." It's figuring out what they already have (a person, a point of view, a community) and building the right container around it.

I was thinking about this recently when I heard that Ina Garten launched a podcast called Happy Hour With Ina Garten with Vox Media.

On paper, it's your standard weekly celebrity interview podcast. Ina invites people over for conversation, stories, food, and cocktails. Vox Media is handling sales, marketing, and distribution, and the video version lives on Ina's new YouTube channel.

I watched the first couple of episodes, and it's very well-produced. It's beautifully shot in a nice New York apartment with warm lighting, and it’s cozy and inviting, like you're sitting at the table with close friends. It doesn't really feel like a podcast, and I think that's on purpose. The format bends to fit Ina, not the other way around.

Like, I guarantee no one thought "how can we turn the Barefoot Contessa into a podcaster." No. They started with Ina: her personality, her curiosity, her reputation, and the feeling people already associate with her. Then they built a recurring format around those things.

And you say "well sure, but she's Ina Garten, not a company," that's kind of my point. Ina is the brand. Decades of cookbooks and TV built it long before anyone handed her a podcast mic. The show didn't create any of that. It just gave it somewhere new to live.

It sounds really obvious, but lemme tell you…it is amazing how often it isn't.

The reason this matters even more now is because different content formats are collapsing into each other. Podcasts are on TV, YouTube shows are podcasts, events get distilled into clips, shows become tours, and creators turn into product companies. When the container keeps changing, the editorial concept has to be stronger. (Sound familiar?)

A clear premise travels. A recognizable personality travels. A useful editorial point of view travels. An audience relationship travels.

"We have a podcast" does not.

I've seen this play out with the branded shows I've built, too. At Glitch, I worked on Function with Anil Dash, a show about technology, culture, society, and the ways all of those things collide. It didn't work because Glitch needed "content." We already had plenty. It worked because we had a host with a real point of view. Anil had spent years thinking, speaking, and writing publicly about technology, power, platforms, culture, and who gets included in building the web. Glitch had a perspective, too: at its core, the company cared about making building software more approachable, creative, weird, and human.

Function gave those ideas room to breathe. We could talk about big topics like surveillance and labor and the social consequences of technical decisions, and it all made sense because the show carried the same spirit the company believed in and it’s what Anil had been preaching for years. Audiences loved it too: it became a Top 200 ranked show in the Technology category on Apple Podcasts upon launch, and its early popularity quickly laid the foundation for our second season.

That proved to me that a branded podcast doesn't become interesting simply because the company paying for it is interesting. The show needs its own editorial reason to exist.

Honestly, though, Glitch was the easy case. The host and the point of view were already sitting there. CodeSandbox was harder, because it started exactly where this post did.

The initial premise was "CodeSandbox needs a podcast." I asked the same questions, and the real premise turned out to be this: CodeSandbox exists inside a larger ecosystem of people building tools for the web and we want to be part of that mindshare. What conversations would be useful to that ecosystem?

That gave us a strategy and somewhere to go. Actually, it gave us two shows. The CodeSandbox Podcast was built around the developer community surrounding the product. On Version One, I talked with the people behind influential web tools and companies about how their products actually got made, including the CEOs of Webflow, Netlify, and Vercel. Guests talked about product decisions, early mistakes, technical tradeoffs, and a lot more. Those conversations were already adjacent to CodeSandbox's audience and identity, so we didn't need to spend every episode elbowing our way into the conversation.

In my experience, the best branded shows understand that the brand earns something by creating a worthwhile editorial experience. It's an opportunity to demonstrate what you care about, to show your taste, and to introduce people to interesting ideas. That creates an association between your company and a particular community, a segment of culture, or an area of expertise. And if you're lucky, you barely need to talk about your product at all.

That's true of Ina, of Glitch, and of CodeSandbox. None of them manufactured a conversation around the brand. They recognized what they had and built the right container around it.

That's why I push back when somebody tells me they want to start a podcast before they've worked out what they're actually trying to build. Those four questions I ask at the start aren't there to talk anyone out of it. When the answers are good, they're the whole blueprint: a clear editorial question (what you have to say), a credible host (who should say it), an existing community (why anyone would come back), and something the company genuinely has permission, for lack of a better word, to talk about (why a podcast, and why you).

And if you don't have answers yet, that's fine too! Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is absolutely nothing until you have a better idea.

That's the real work. Everything else is production.

Have Podcast, Will Travel

Lately I’ve been getting questions about this part of my EveryExpert profile:

“I won't tell everyone to start a podcast. Hell, some ideas are better as newsletters or social media accounts.”

It probably sounds like bad advice coming from a podcast consultant, right? But I say that on my profile because I’m less interested in the format than I am in what someone is actually trying to build.

Look at it this way: a podcast is basically a container for an idea. It can be a very good container, but if your goal is to build a durable audience, a media property, a body of intellectual property, or a professional platform, “we’re making a podcast” doesn’t answer the more important question: what is the thing underneath it that people actually care about?

A few things happening in media lately have made that distinction easier to see.

Podcasts from Crooked Media are now airing as television programming on weekends on MS NOW. According to the network, half of the audience for its Crooked Media programming weren’t previously watching MS NOW on Saturdays. Among viewers under 55, nearly two-thirds were new to the network. Impressive!

That’s more than expanding Crooked Media’s distribution; they’re bringing their audience along with them. The shows already have recognizable hosts, strong editorial voices, and relationships with people who will follow them into a different environment. That’s a very different power relationship from the one podcasting had with traditional media not even a decade ago.

Then there’s MS NOW itself. Its president, Rebecca Kutler, recently talked about expanding the network’s strategy to include a paid membership program built around its anchors and media personalities. The idea includes exclusive content, direct interaction, and other community features. It kinda sounds like a more formal Patreon, but the important part is what they’re monetizing: access to people the audience already recognizes and trusts. The personality becomes part of the media property.

And then there’s David Brooks, who recently left The New York Times and launched a new podcast with Yale University and The Atlantic. You’ve got a recognizable writer, a university, and a media organization all joining around a recurring idea. The podcast is the delivery mechanism, but the value underneath it is broader: Brooks’ voice, Yale’s academic expertise, The Atlantic’s production and distribution, and an editorial premise they can all participate in.

Three very different examples, but they’re all pointing toward the same thing: the podcast matters, but what the podcast helps build could matter much more.

That has me thinking a lot about intellectual property and portability.

If a podcast becomes less important than the editorial property built around it, does that property even need to stay inside a podcast?

I had to answer some version of that question myself when I stopped producing Revision Path two years ago. For eleven years, that show was the center of my professional (and personal) life. There was always another interview to schedule, another guest to research, another episode to edit, another week on the calendar.

Then production stopped. The work didn’t suddenly lose its value. There were still hundreds of conversations, the reputation and history of the show, and an archive documenting more than a decade of Black designers, developers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, and other creative professionals talking about their work and their lives.

Eventually, I had to stop thinking about Revision Path only as a podcast because it had become something larger than its publishing format. The interviews became an archive. The archive became historical documentation. And the show’s reputation became authority I could carry into writing, speaking, consulting, research, and whatever else I decide to do with it.

The podcast ended, but the property didn’t. And I think more podcasters are going to have to make that mental shift earlier.

Take video, for example. There’s been endless discussion about whether podcasts “need” video, which I think misses the more interesting point. If someone watches your podcast on a television — and according to recent data from Sounds Profitable, that number is rising — they’re going to experience it differently than someone listening on their phone or through a smart speaker.

Suddenly framing matters. And lighting. And body language. And of course, audio. Even the pace of a conversation can feel different when you’re looking at two people talk instead of just listening to them. The content may be fundamentally the same, but once the container changes, the editorial experience changes with it. That doesn’t mean every podcast needs to become a big-budget television production, but it does mean that the environment becomes part of the experience. And if your work can move between those environments without losing what makes it valuable, you’ve probably built something more durable than an audio or video file shared through an RSS feed.

That brings me back to those lines from my EveryExpert profile.

What exactly are you building? Because if the answer is simply “a podcast,” that may not be enough, at least not if your larger goal is to build something that can last, grow, or move beyond the platform where it started.

My point isn’t about forcing every idea into more formats. Instead, identify what part of your idea is actually valuable enough to survive the podcast format. Maybe you have an idea people recognize, or you’re a host that people implicitly trust. You could even have an audience that will follow you wherever you go next. Or maybe you’ve got something strong enough to work on television, on stage, or in print.

Whatever it is, that is the thing worth paying attention to. The podcast may be where it starts, but the real question is whether what you built can travel without it.