Acorns CEO Noah Kerner says the company has amassed 2.2 million investment accounts in about five years. Acorns

In 2012, father-son duo Walter and Jeff Cruttenden launched Acorns, the savings app that allows users to invest their spare change with the aim of trying to take the anxiety out of saving.

Nearly five years later, the company has amassed more than 2.2 million accounts. In 2014 Noah Kerner, an early investor in the company and three time entrepreneur, was brought on as CEO by the company's founders. Kerner, a former DJ who once shared a stage with singer Jennifer Lopez, has been turning the company into more than just an investment app.

"Robo-advising is just a piece of our puzzle," he told Business Insider.

Under Kerner's leadership, the company rolled out Grow Magazine, a section of the app where users can read stories about finance and investing. It also launched a rewards program called Found Money, which gives its users bonus investment cash when they shop at brand partners like Nike, AirBnB, and Apple

The company has made a string of hires as well, bringing on Jennifer Arceneaux, the head of external relations for Sundance Institute, the organization behind the Sundance Film Festival, and Jennifer Barrett, a former editor at CNBC.

We recently met up with Kerner while he was visiting New York City from California to talk about his vision for the company's future.

The big goal, says Kerner, is to reach every American who makes less than $100,000 in household income. For context, that's around 74% of US households, according to the Census Bureau's 2016 American Community Survey.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Frank Chaparro: How is business?

Noah Kerner: Business is great. We have opened up more than 2.2 million investment accounts in the US. We're growing at around 100,000 accounts per month. We have a nice percentage of our customers using Found Money. Half of our customers are reading Grow every month.

Chaparro: That's impressive growth. Who are your customers, and how engaged are they with the app?

Kerner: Our customer is the person whose household income is under $100,000, which is the majority of Americans. We created Acorns from the ground up to serve their best interests. We started with micro-investing, which allows them to invest their spare change. Once they get more engaged they can set recurring investments — $5 a day, $5 a week, for instance — whatever works for them.

And then we rolled out in our second year Grow, which is about helping users grow their knowledge of money and finance. And then we launched Found Money, which is all about helping them earn extra money. But the road map is focused on the thesis of serving Americans whose household income is under $100,000 per year.

Chaparro: How have you been building out Grow Magazine? And what's its relation to the broader strategy of the company?

Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

Kerner: We recently brought on Jennifer Barrett, who was at finance editor at CNBC. She was also at the Wall Street Journal. Grow is professionally produced content that simplifies that which is complex for many people. It's a media property essentially.

But it is part of the app. Most of our customers really benefit from this education. It's not just about saving and investing; it is also about credit; it is about borrowing; it is about income. And we provide stories too.

We wrote a piece about seven people who made it from the bottom: Sarah Jessica Parker and Howard Schultz. These people came from nothing and made it. That is central to our big idea that anyone can grow wealth. Most people who have wealth came from nothing or their parents came from nothing. And this idea that anyone can grow wealth is central to what we do. We call our customers the "up-and-comer." And we are not just a millennial brand, right. Our customers run the gamut from 18 to 98. But the thing they all share in common is income level.

Chaparro: Content seems to be the hot thing for online investing companies these days. I know that Stash and Robinhood, for instance. Both have content users can read on their app. And their target demographic is similar. What specifically differentiates Acorns from the rest?

Kerner: Investing spare change is still unique to us. Our focus on the up-and-comer is unique. The quality of our educational content is unique to us. And we’ve got many unique partnerships that add lots of value to our customers. 

Right now, if you become an Airbnb host, Airbnb invests $200 into your Acorns account. Every time you shop with Nike, they invest 5% of the purchase price into your Acorns account. Every time you book a trip with Hotel Tonight, they put $10 into your Acorns account. So you're slowly accumulating small amounts of money from different places. Some is from your spare change; some is from your shopping. And this isn't us encouraging people to shop more. Our thought process is shop smart.

We want our users to use the Found Money feature so they can get extra money while they shop, which will be invested in their future. And that's a powerful idea for our customers, and it is a powerful idea for brands because from their perspective they are increasing loyalty for their brands by investing in their customers' future. And of course it helps us grow our business.

You asked how we stand out. I would say we stand out by our mission on top of all that, first and foremost. We're looking out for the financial best interests of the up-and-comer. Everything connects to that. We stand out from our corporate values. And our core value is to lead with our heart.

It is very important to what we do. We stand out with those features of course. The education is the latest thing. It is very strong content made by professional journalists, that provides the kind of educational content that is vital for our customers' edification and consumption. And we're building the road map out from there.

Chaparro: I've read criticisms of the app that say its fees aren't as low as they're marketed. Folks only investing a small amount of money per month, in some cases, could end up paying more in fees as a percentage than someone with an account balance above $5,000. What's your response?

Kerner: So for most people, it is a dollar a month. For a dollar a month, for the price, what we offer is a big value. We obviously encourage people to use Acorns to the fullest — take advantage of Found Money, take advantage of the round-ups, automatic rebalancing, dividend reinvestments, dollar-cost averaging. Use the product to the fullest. For a dollar a month it is fantastic.

Acorns charges $1 a month for all accounts with balances below $5,000. Acorns

We keep the investment side of it very simple. We do recommend a portfolio to customers once they finish registration. And we diversify it. It is very important. When you talk to people like Warren Buffett, this is the strategy that he recommends as well. And we subscribe to that idea. We think is the right strategy for our customers. Frankly, we think it's the right strategy for all customers.

There's this feeling when you come back to the app, and it's working in the background of life. That feeling, you know — the third day, the seventh day, the 15th day — you come back and you see a balance that has accumulated; it is really encouraging for people. And it starts to get you in the habit of saving and investing, and that encouragement helps people move along on that journey. And it's because it is such a magical moment for people checking the app.

Chaparro: There's this question hanging over the investing space regarding apps like Acorns and other online investment startups. Without someone to guide them through the bad times, do you think investors are more prone to pull their money out if there's a major correction?

Kerner: That's where the educational content comes into play. We are constantly educating our customers about those kinds of events, so they stick with it. Markets go up and down. The only way you lock in losses is by pulling out. Those kinds of lessons. That's why we got into this business of content, because we need to prepare our customers for great moments and bad moments.

Chaparro: What are some of your hard goals over the next decade?

Kerner: We would like everyone in America who makes under $100,000 to be using Acorns. We think it is good for everyone in America to be using Acorns. And it is not an artificial cut-off. But we think people who make a lot of income and have a lot of net-worth are pretty well served.

I grew up on 14th Street and Avenue A. I grew up around kids who didn't come from a lot. I was a competitive tennis player. And so at nights I would play tennis with kids who came from a lot. I went to private high school in New York City and again got to spend time with kids who came from a lot. But the summer of my junior year, I worked as a bank teller working with single moms with four kids making $8 an hour.

After Cornell, I traveled America as a DJ on a tour, and I got to see the way most of Americans lived. And there are great riches on both sides, as far as their personalities. But there is such a powerful sense of disenfranchisement and inequality of wealth that exists in this country. The fact that this exists in a country like America is not right.

And our belief is that we need to equip this group with the tools they need to be financially successful. And we need to help them believe — and this isn't bulls--- — we need to help them believe that anyone can build wealth. And not to focus on this group or that group. Focus on yourself, do the right thing, save, invest, learn, spend responsibly, save for an emergency. For us and me this is a real mission.

Thomson Reuters

Chaparro: Hype is in no short supply in finance. With AI, cryptocurrencies, machine learning, et cetera, abuzz, how do you stay focused and decide what can have a real impact on your business and what is noise?

Kerner: I wrote a book called "Chasing Cool," which was formed out of my experiences with corporations and brands that thought in order to create something successful you need to jump on the latest trend or bandwagon.

With cryptocurrencies, you see people integrating it into their product, and everyone is looking at investing in it. People need to hang on a second. Think about what you stand for, what is your product about, and ask yourself if this really fits into it. Think, "Is this really something that makes sense within the context of what we are trying to create and build?" And if it is, then go after it. But don't do it because it is the new hot thing.

I am a personal believer in having a very crystal clear vision, values, and mission, and sticking to it. We have a 10-year road map. For something to move us off course from what that road map is, it has to be something we really thought through, something that we really believe is significant. It is not going to be something that is a shiny object, of-the-moment-type thing.

"Stranger Things." Netflix

If you happened to open Snapchat last Friday, you would have likely stumbled upon a Netflix lens that was designed to make you feel like you were inside the famous living room from its hit series “Stranger Things.”

With a few taps of your mobile screen, you could interact with several items in the digital version of the "Stranger Things" room – like bookshelves that shake and mysteriously boarded up windows – all via an augmented reality experience constructed by the team at Snap.

The Netflix lens is a prime example of Snapchat's 3D World Lenses, the latest iteration of the company’s popular sponsored lenses that let people feature animated branded objects into their snaps. It's perhaps Snapchat's most sophisticated lens to date.

And more notably, it further cemented Snapchat’s position as the leader in augmented reality, ahead of competitors like Facebook and Google, at least as far as marketers are concerned.

“In any marketing plan, there’s a host of levers or triggers you can pull,” said Jeremy Sigel, global SVP of partnerships and emerging media at agency Essence. “Augmented reality today should be a part of that marketing mix, and no one does it better than Snapchat.

It is absolutely the leader in creating really engaging augmented reality experiences through its lenses.”

If Snapchat could cement its reputation as the pace-setting pioneer for a new form of augmented reality advertising, it may have found a much-needed competitive differentiator as it struggles to prove its mettle as a newly public company.

‘A home to brand icons’

Snapchat has been at the forefront of augmented reality long before 3D World Lenses were introduced, ever since it unveiled its first rainbow-barfing lens back in September 2015 that pushed the technology into the mainstream.

Hundreds of brands have dabbled in and tasted success with sponsored lenses since then. Take for instance Taco Bell, which had its 2016 Cinco De Mayo taco lens viewed 224 million times, with the average Snapchat user playing with it for around 24 seconds

Taco Bell

Another such brand is King Games, the UK-based game maker behind games such as Candy Crush among others, which has run three lenses on the platform over the past few years. Its latest lens is an augmented reality-focused 3D World Lens centered around Halloween this week that features Stella, the main character in its game Bubble Witch 3 Saga.

According to Richard Hocking, VP of Performance Marketing at King, the company continues to invest in the platform because users spend time more time with the brand in an interactive way on Snapchat than they would anywhere else.

“We are always looking to innovate in the way we engage with consumers, and AR lenses and filters provide a fun and interactive way to bring our game and characters to life in the real world,” he told Business Insider. “Snapchat seem to be leading the AR innovation since their product is centered around the camera, and they have scale to continually test, iterate and improve quickly.”

Not only do augmented reality-based lenses take branded experiences to the next level, but they also allow brands to remain authentic, said Jacob Taylor, founder and CEO of experiential marketing firm CivitasNow.

“What’s interesting about 3D World Lenses is that they give a home to brand icons and mascots,” he said. “Take the Bud Light man. There’s never been another platform where that icon could naturally thrive before without disrupting the experience.”

Value for Money

Brands go where there audiences are. And increasingly, brands are realizing that their audiences are not only on Snapchat, but are also demonstrating a clear appetite for and engaging with augmented reality on the platform.

Snapchat’s dancing hot dog filter, for example, quickly became an internet sensation this summer. It was viewed 1.5 billion times, leading CEO Evan Spiegel to call it the "world’s first augmented reality superstar."

Further, more than one in three Snapchat users play with lenses every day, with an average user spending over three minutes doing so, Snapchat said in its second quarter earnings this year. It is no surprise then, that brands want in.

Universal Pictures

Take Universal Pictures, which has bought everything from Snap ads to World Lenses for its various movie releases over the years, and has consistently seen promising results. According to Doug Neil, EVP of digital marketing at Universal Pictures, the brand’s engagement metrics are often “two times the usual benchmarks."

This is not surprising, said Jill Sherman, head of social media at DigitasLBi. This is because lenses are also contextual, and advertisers can buy lenses that target specific audience segments, based on age, gender and the platform’s own audience segments the kind of Snapchat content they consume.

“Younger audiences don’t seem to mind being central to the ad — and that’s basically all a branded lens is,” said Sherman.

Snapchat has faced lots of criticism with regards to the kind of measurement data it provides advertisers. Thus, over the past year it has partnered with several analytics firms to gauge the performance of its various ad products, including sponsored lenses. 

The company says it now has lots of data showing that lens are more memorable that the average ad and actually can change people's opinions of brands, even driving buying decisions. Campaigns with lenses drive a 19.7 point lift in ad awareness, a 6.4 point lift in brand awareness, and a 3.4 point lift in action intent on average, said Imran Khan, chief strategy officer, speaking at Advertising Week last month.

For example, Lenses for movie campaigns delivered a return on ad spending that was 5.3 times larger than other typical online and offline ads in that category, according to the marketing technology firm Neustar.

A media agency executive, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed that on average, the agency's clients Snapchat Lens ads drove people to take some sort of action at twice the rate of other Snapchat campaigns. 

The path ahead

Snapchat, with its unique set of tools and push for innovation, has essentiallly managed to create a brand new ad category.

"They’ve also done a great job of delivering pioneering ad products such as lenses and geofilters, that have been custom built on the back of their audience’s nuanced behaviors,” said Tom Buontempo, president at Attention.

And yet, the path ahead isn’t without its challenges.

For one, Facebook has been rapidly adding Snapchat-like features into its suites of apps, most blatantly Instagram. In just over a year, Instagram Stories has managed to mimic some of  Snapchat’s best features including face filters. Sponsored ones could very well be on the horizon soon.

And sponsored lenses don’t necessarily come cheap. In fact, until recently, they came with quite a hefty price tag, costing advertisers anywhere between $300,000 and $750,000 for a single day. Taco Bell, for context, spent between $500,000 and $750,000 on its lens by most estimates.

But lenses — even hi-tech 3D ones powered by AR — are getting cheaper, according to Snapchat. These days, premium content placements with targeting can often cost more than lenses, according to a company spokesperson.

In fact, for around $300,000, Snapchat’s internal team offers to both create and distribute a face as well as a 3D World Lens. There is no markup for adding 3D objects to a lens.

Plus, Snapchat is also bundling in a number of other services to encourage advertisers to invest in lenses. The company promises to develop all lens creative in-house in six weeks. It's even faster if a company has already built its own Snapchat lens.

And of course, when done well, Lens ads can prove a bargain compared to other media. Taco Bell’s lens, for example, was viewed 224 million times in a single day — which is double the views of a Super Bowl ad for one-tenth the price for context, as Business Insider had reported earlier.

“Brand advertisers are still very much focused on TV and that’s not going to change anytime soon,” said Essence’s Sigel. “But in some cases, lenses are likely to have a bigger impact for a brand than a 2D TV ad.”

Ultimately, Facebook isn't the only competitor that Snapchat must be on the lookout for when it comes to augmented reality. Google and Apple are both closing in as well, with the latter's iOS 11 update enabling the iPhone camera to integrate graphics into the real world. The ubiquity of both Apple and Android devices also means that they can probably scale the technology at a much faster clip than even Snapchat.

"Building the capability within the phone is going to make consumers a lot more willing to engage with the technology," said Sargi Mann, EVP of digital strategy at Havas Media.

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

If you watched any of the riveting World Series (and based on the ratings, lots of you did), you undoubtedly saw ads for YouTube TV.

The fledgling subscription service from the makers of Google was everywhere during the series, as Fox's presenting sponsor. It's famed play button was ever present right behind batters (Business Insider called it "brilliant" while SB Nation called it "terrible). Either way, if you watched, you saw it.

Speaking of watching, hopefully Facebook was. Because the YouTube TV Series campaign is exactly what the social network needs to do for Facebook Watch.

Facebook is betting big on making Facebook a destination for video content that will challenge YouTube and ideally TV, and it's funding lots of shows.

But as CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Wednesday on the company's earnings call, while people watch tons of videos on Facebook's news feed, that's not necessarily why people come to Facebook in the first place. They're mostly there to check in on what friends are doing or saying and seeing who dressed up as what for Halloween. Most don't come in 'video mode.'

"We need to build this behavior," said Zuckerberg.

And to be sure, there are Facebook Watch shows that already seem to be taking off, like "Ball in the Family." And there's been some recent evidence that the Facebook algorithm is pretty good at showing people things they might like (see: Putin, Vladimir).

Still, how many people even know that Facebook has a "Watch" tab, let alone that it has video series? Well, someone probably needs to tell the world that Watch exists. Advertisers call that "awareness."

A few weeks ago, how many people knew that YouTube was in the TV business? Now they surely do. They may not be able to articulate exactly what YouTube TV offers or doesn't (is this the one with ESPN? Does it have Bravo or not?) but they know it's a thing. And the messaging – "cable free live TV" – was direct. If you don't like cable, or if you're a cord-never person, YouTube TV might be worth a look.

That might not win YouTube TV millions of subscribers overnight. But advertising at least puts the new service in people's "consideration set" (to use more marketing talk).

If Facebook truly wants Watch to take on TV, it should seriously consider going on TV to talk about it.

(L-R) Director Taika Waititi and Chris Hemsworth on the set of "Thor: Ragnarok." Disney/Marvel

 

“Thor: Ragnarok” has huge fight scenes (led by the bulging biceps of its lead Chris Hemsworth), and CGI-fueled destruction from the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) — all things we’ve become accustomed to from Marvel movies — but it also has hilarious deadpan humor, and an improvisational feel that’s a refreshing new element to the franchise. And that stuff you can thank director Taika Waititi for.

The New Zealand filmmaker known best for directing episodes of HBO’s “Flight of the Concords,” and indie movies “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” might be the most unlikely director to answer the Marvel call. However, what he’s given “Ragnarok” (opening in theaters November 3) is a new kind of Marvel story that intentionally veers from its conventional “save the world” blueprint, and hypes up the comedy aspects while still telling a thrilling story.

Business Insider spoke to Waititi about being allowed to amp up the weird on a huge blockbuster, why he was convinced Marvel would get fed up with his unconventional style, his decision to voice the movie’s scene-stealing Korg character, and the idea of flashback scenes of Thor and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) as kids that didn’t make the cut.

Jason Guerrasio: I love how you describe your work being a mix between comedy, drama, and "the clumsiness of humanity." Is that formula easier or harder to pull off in a superhero movie?

Taika Waititi: I actually feel like it's harder because you just have to spend more time figuring out what those clumsy elements are in these larger than life characters. How to make the characters more relatable to the audience. Really, when I look at the story of Thor, how I kind of get myself in there and figure out I can tell the story, is actually looking at it in terms of an indie film. It's about a guy trying to get home because there's someone in his house, and he's got to sort that out. And along the way he's got his annoying brother, a drunk chick, and some bipolar kid with him. [Laughs.] And he's just trying to get home. So that's the way into the story, and then it's how do I apply those things into spaceships and explosions. 

(Center) Taika Waititi on the set of "Thor: Ragnarok." Marvel

Guerrasio: Take that indie idea and then go really big with it. 

Waititi: Yeah. 

Guerrasio: So when you had the early talks with Marvel about the project, did you lay all the cards on the table and say that you weren't interested in making the typical Marvel franchise movie?

Waititi: Yeah. But they knew that as well. They said that. "We know this isn't going to be very fulfilling for you to come in and continue with what we've done. And we don't want to continue with what we've done. We want to do something very fresh and new."

Guerrasio: And that must have been music to your ears. 

Waititi: It was.

Guerrasio: Was there a moment through all this when you said to yourself, "Wow, they are really letting me do this the way I want to do it!"

Waititi: Within reason. There were moments when you're like, "Wow, this is something that I never thought I'd be allowed to put into a superhero movie." But I came in knowing I'd bring character, tone, and dialogue — those are my strengths. Marvel's job really is just to keep me in my lane and make sure I'm not crashing the car. Derailing the Avengers. [Laughs.]

Guerrasio: That being said, did you ever get told by Marvel after they looked at the dailies to tone it down?

Waititi: No. There was never a moment like that, which was both surprising and also disconcerting. "Wow, man, are they even watching the dailies?" We were doing stuff that was so different. I remember after a couple of days working with Chris [Hemsworth] and Mark [Ruffalo], Mark came up to me and said, "I'll be surprised if you and I are back here on Monday. I have a feeling like we're breaking this. They are going to get rid of us." We were just doing whatever we felt we wanted to see in the film. That includes a scene with Hulk and Thor sitting on a bed talking about their emotions and apologizing to each other after an argument. Which is not something I felt I've ever seen in a superhero movie. 

(L-R) Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk in "Thor: Ragnarok." Marvel

Guerrasio: But strangely, those lighthearted "real" scenes are what I remember most from this movie.

Waititi: Totally. And I feel that is the point of difference that I've managed to bring. What would everyone expect from this and let's do the opposite. That's what we were saying to each other often when we were shooting. "Does this feel like we've seen it before? And if so, how do we change it?" I've seen the hero in a movie getting beaten up by a bunch of people, and then a mysterious figure comes in and saves them, and the person takes off their mask and it's the love interest. How about we make that love interest (the Valkyrie character played by Tessa Thompson) more like Han Solo and she's a drunk, gambling mercenary who in her introductory scene falls off the ramp of her spaceship. 

Guerrasio: I read that in your sizzle reel to Marvel you had scenes from "Sixteen Candles" because there was a time when you were planning to do flashback scenes of Thor as a kid.

Waititi: Yeah. I did.

Guerrasio: How long did you play around with that flashback idea?

Waititi: It was in the first couple months of storylining. We always wondered, could we put in these flashbacks and make them work. To me it still feels like a great idea, but it was one element too many. It was very hard to justify doing. It would have felt like just this one-off little flashback and it needed more. We could have done it when Thor talks about one of the times Loki tried to kill him. 

Guerrasio: Instead of Thor describing it in that scene there could have been a jump to a flashback?

Waititi: Yeah. But it's actually better that we didn't flashback because it's funnier him just telling the story.

Guerrasio: It's funny, but I don't know, watching a teen Thor and Loki in a flashback scene would have been really great.

Waititi: It would have been funnier if it was this ongoing thing where we had more and more of those stories through the movie.

Guerrasio: Yes.

Waititi: But just a one-off would have just thrown people off too much. 

Guerrasio: The one thing I'm kind of bummed about was that the trailer revealed that Hulk is Thor's opponent in their fight on Sakaar. The buildup is so great. Are you disappointed that was used in the trailer?

Waititi: Not necessarily. I felt like it was something everyone knew was going to happen because Mark was in the movie. It's very hard to keep any of that stuff under wraps. Marvel knows in many ways with something like that you have to give it out. 

Taika Waititi is the voice of Korg in "Thor: Ragnarok." Marvel

Guerrasio: How early on did you want to do the Korg character?

Waititi: That was definitely in the script early on, but we didn't end up doing a huge amount with it until much later on in prep. There were many other story points we had to worry about, we knew this character was going to be in at least one or two scenes as a kind of information giver. I knew I was going to play something in the film because I always put myself in my films but I didn't know what. And he was one of the few minor characters that hadn't been cast yet so I decided to do that one. Also, it was small enough that it wouldn't infringe on my concentration with directing the film. Which was the priority. The more I found the voice through the read-through the more funny we found it. The more jokes came out of those reads. 

Guerrasio: How did you find the voice?

Waititi: Just through reading the script through with Chris. We would start getting into those scenes and I would play with the voice and we thought wouldn't it be funny if this big hulking rock guy had this very delicate voice? I kind of based it on people I remember from home. So it's a strange combination of a big guy with a gentle-natured presence. Chris was loving that when we started doing those scenes, and we started shooting some stuff, and Marvel thought it was really funny and I really enjoyed doing it. Chris wanted to do more, so we injected him into more and more scenes and before you know it he was all over the movie. 

Guerrasio: Before I go, what's the latest on the Bubbles the Chimp stop-motion movie you’re doing for Netflix.

Waititi: I'm excited about it. We are in very early stages. Early development with design and trying to figure out the schedule. I think all the work I would be doing is the up-front design and recording and see those guys off and let them do their thing. 

Kevin Spacey attends the 2017 Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall on June 11, 2017 in New York City. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions

Netflix is parting ways with Kevin Spacey, the star and executive producer of "House of Cards."

"Netflix will not be involved with any further production of House of Cards that includes Kevin Spacey," Netflix said in a statement Friday night. "We will continue to work with MRC during this hiatus time to evaluate our path forward as it relates to the show."

"We have also decided we will not be moving forward with the release of the film Gore, which was in post-production, starring and produced by Kevin Spacey."

"Gore" is a biopic of writer Gore Vidal staring Spacey that had had recently wrapped shooting.

Media Rights Capital, the production company behind "House of Cards," confirmed that Spacey is off the show.

"While we continue the ongoing investigation into the serious allegations concerning Kevin Spacey's behavior on the set of House of Cards, he has been suspended, effective immediately," MRC said in a statement. "MRC, in partnership with Netflix, will continue to evaluate a creative path forward for the program during the hiatus."

Spacey has been accused by several men — including many who were underage at the time — of sexual harassment and assault. Eight people who worked on "House of Cards" have reportedly accused Spacey of sexual harassment or assault.

Representatives for the actor recently said that Spacey will "seek evaluation and treatment" following the series of sexual misconduct allegations against him. Spacey's agency and publicist have reportedly dropped the actor.

Spacey's apology to actor Adam Rapp, who said Spacey made a sexual advance on him at age 14, sparked criticism when he chose to come out as gay in the same statement.

Netflix had previously halted production on "House of Cards" and announced that the upcoming season, its sixth, would be its last.

Producers were also reportedly talking about killing off Spacey's character, Frank Underwood.

U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT), Senator Al Franken (D-MN) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) show a fake social media post for a non-existent "Miners for Trump" rally as representatives of Twitter, Facebook and Google testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., October 31, 2017 Reuters

On Tuesday the Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing on social media's role in the 2016 election. Lawyers from Google, Twitter and Facebook all testified, as did two national security experts.

As you can imagine, a lot of things were said at this hearing. Senators Al Franken (D-MN), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Chris Coons (D-DE) even brought offensive and misleading social media ads with them to serve as examples of what is rampant on platforms even to this day. Franken barked at Facebook's representative for accepting payment for US political ads in rubles, and Ted Cruz (R-TX) took the opportunity to talk about how persecuted he and members of his party feel on the internet.

The real piece de resistance of the entire hearing, however, came from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA). It was very simple.

"I don't believe you have the ability to identify all your advertisers," Kennedy said to the witnesses.

I'm going to rephrase that more plainly as: I don't believe you have control over what's really happening on your internet space.

Now if you're Senator Kennedy and you and your colleagues think these ads caused chaos, and you don't think that these tech giants can handle this problem themselves, then there's only one solution — the federal government will have to do it.

If that's where we wind up, that could change the very nature of these companies and that should terrify them. 

Cue all the libertarians patiently awaiting the singularity in Silicon Valley huffing into paper bags right now.

It's not hard to understand why Senator Kennedy came to that conclusion. As much as Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said he was "deeply concerned" about all of the threats and misinformation on his platform, and worried that finding out what happened would be "particularly painful for communities who engaged with this content" — he also admitted Facebook watched the problem grow for 2 years and basically did nothing.

Then there was Google's General Counsel, who admitted that Russian President Vladimir Putin's TV channel mouthpiece RT had preferred status on YouTube because of its popularity and well... algorithms. Facebook gave a similar reason for why its platform generated anti-Semitic tags for users to find. No counsel — especially not Twitter's — could reconcile the inherently necessary power of automation on their platform with their company's inability to fully control it across their platform.

A few more troubling moments:

Senator Blumenthal shows a voter suppression ad on Facebook that used actor Aziz Ansari's image.C PBS screenshot

There was a moment when Senator  Blumenthal showed a bunch of current Facebook ads that look exactly like ones the company had down already. He wanted to know why the current ads weren't also taken down.

Stretch explained that it was because Facebook took down the first ads, not because of their content, but because they were bought by Russians.

Of course, all the lawyers also admitted that shell companies really make it impossible to know who is buying ads — so the current Facebook ads Senator Blumenthal could be Russian bought too. It's hard to say, really.

You see Kennedy's point.

So what do we do?

All of the companies agreed that what happened was terrible. They agreed that the system, as it is now, isn't working. They agreed that fake accounts and bots are a menace. They agreed that they would help Washington write legislation to combat this. They also, however, agreed that they had no way of knowing if any measures would stop the proliferation of violent speech, propaganda, and misinformation on major social media platforms.

Luckily, we've done this before in America. Back in the 1930s radio was the new menace carrying misinformation and propaganda from quasi-fascist American demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. The government had to make a concerted effort to teach the populace how to be educated listeners, and it had to come up with some rules. Specifically, it settled on the Communications Act of 1934, which said broadcasters didn't have to run every single ad any old client paid for but instead should consider what served the public interest.

In other words, broadcasters could be discerning, and they wanted to be. The alternative was something called "common carriage" and meant anyone with a bunch of money could say any nasty thing on the radio they wanted and broadcasters couldn't say no.

Even though Facebook, Google, and Twitter can kick you off their platforms, they're essentially fighting for common carriage. They don't want to make value and editorial judgments to serve the public interest — they'd rather have bots do it, or you do it, or whoever — j ust not them, and not (as Senator Kennedy might like) the government. 

Back to the hearing. After the lawyers left the stand a couple of national security experts addressed the Senators just as something terrible was unfolding miles away. A terrorist crashed a truck into pedestrians in lower Manhattan. Eight people were killed and 5 were injured.

Terrorism analyst Michael Smith was on the stand as word of the violence reached the hearing. He admitted that there was chatter of a potential attack all over ISIS social media, especially Twitter. This was before the attacker was even identified.

Allowing ISIS to even have Twitter accounts is a feature of a common carriage system. Question is, is that the system we want on these platforms? Or do we want them to have to behave more like regular broadcasters?

Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who has addressed the committee on this matter before, suggested that attribution in social media issue advertising be the same as it is in broadcast or print advertising — you have to know who's buying your ads.

And then Watts said something Silicon Valley really won't like:

Social media companies continue to get beat in part because they rely too heavily on technologists and technical detection to catch bad actors. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will greatly assist in cleaning up nefarious activity, but will for the near future, fail to detect that which hasn’t been seen before.

Threat intelligence proactively anticipating how bad actors will use social media platforms to advance their cause must be used to generate behavioral indicators that inform technical detection. Those that understand the intentions and actions of criminals, terrorists and authoritarians must work alongside technologists to sustain the integrity of social media platforms.

This has become an effective, improved and common practice in cybersecurity efforts to deter hackers, but to date, I’ve not seen a social media company routinely and successfully employ this approach.

In other words. You need humans, and you need human judgment. Lots of it. Algorithms should not be able to determine what constitutes as civil or uncivil speech, even when it comes to non-violent domestic politics.

And, by the way, we've been trusting humans to do this in broadcasting since 1973. That's when the Supreme Court ruled in CBS v. Democratic National Committee that broadcasters had the right to accept or reject political issue advertising — that they could exercise editorial control to (again) serve the public interest. 

In accepting this we as a nation accepted that there's the right to free speech, and then there's the right to decent speech.

But Silicon Valley giants don't want to have to determine what is decent. Where the broadcasters of the 1930s relished it as their responsibility, tech giants view it as a burden that fundamentally changes their identities. Plus, bottom line, if you have a human do this you actually have to pay them — it's expensive.

Making calls about what is and is not acceptable speech in social space is hard. Moral relativism is much easier, but its consequences aren't something we can live with anymore. Someone has to get this under control. The more Silicon Valley shows that it can't, the more Washington will feel it has no choice but to step in. 

Reddit

 

Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman were 22 years old when they sold Reddit, a popular online community, to publishing house Condé Nast for between $10 million and $20 million.

They sold it within two years of starting the company.

The pair shared the experience and the drama that followed during a live podcast taping of "How I Built This" with NPR's Guy Raz in San Francisco in August.

"This was 16 months of work that was going to mean more money for me than my entire family — my mother and father — had made in their entire lives," Ohanian told Raz on stage.

Reddit, the so-called "front page of the internet," is now valued at $1.8 billion. But before it became the eighth most popular site on the internet, Reddit nearly met an early end.

In the years following the site's sale, the company was almost taken over by by internet trolls. Users protesting internal issues at Reddit tried to shut the site down, and a revolving door of CEOs did little to stabilize the startup's reputation. Ohanian and Huffman, who took a hiatus from Reddit, were absent during much of that time. Meanwhile, their relationship soured.

Here's how the duo bounced back to save Reddit. (Check out the podcast for the full story.)

Ohanian and Huffman were friends before they were cofounders

The pair met on the first day of college — their dorm rooms were located across the hall from each other at University of Virginia — and played countless hours of PlayStation 2 over the years. As juniors, they hatched an idea for an app (not Reddit) and went into business together.

After a fateful meeting with investor Paul Graham over their spring break, they joined the inaugural class of Y Combinator, a tech startup accelerator, and set out to create Reddit.

An undated photo shows Alexis Ohanian (left) and Steve Huffman (third from left). Flickr/Chloe Rice

Reddit grew to become the 11th biggest site in the world with 70,000 unique visitors by 2006. When Ohanian and Huffman sold it that year to Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications, they joined the media giant as part of their contracts. For three years, they worked on a celebrity-gossip news aggregator, Lipstick.com, that used Reddit's underlying tech.

After eight years of living together, Huffman parted for San Francisco and Ohanian spent some time in Armenia, where his dad's family came from. Their friendship began to falter. They rarely spoke, about Reddit or their lives outside the office, they told NPR.

"When our contracts at Condé Nast expired, we kind of just said, 'Great, see you later," Ohanian said during the taping

"I didn't feel animosity, it was neglect," Huffman said.

They came together when Reddit needed them

In 2015, about five years since Ohanian and Huffman left Reddit, the company looked like it might go under. Internet trolls were spewing messages of hate across the site, and many moderators — users who supervise Reddit's thousands of forums — took their communities offline in protest of a key Reddit staffer's departure. The Southern Poverty Law Center pegged Reddit as an online bulletin board for the most violently racist content on the internet.

At the same time, Ohanian and Huffman started to repair their friendship.

"We never really exercised the muscles that founders have to exercise that best friends don't," Ohanian explained during the podcast. "It's great to be able to start a company with one of your best friends, but the conversations you have as cofounders are very different from the conversations you have as friends. We didn't have enough of the hard ones often enough."

The pair met for dinner in February 2015 and began to take inventory of the events and actions that caused their relationship to fall apart. They agreed at that first dinner to work on it.

"We actually saw my therapist [together]," Huffman told NPR.

Alexis Ohanian designed the mascot for Reddit, which is seen on display in the company's San Francisco offices. Robert Galbraith/Reuters

While they made strides in mending their friendship, operations at Reddit continued to unravel. Ellen Pao resigned as interim CEO in June 2015.

Ohanian served as a board member of Reddit at the time. He called Huffman for back-up.

"I remember my friends being like, 'Why are you running into that burning building?' And it just felt like, at the time, I had no choice. I really, really loved Reddit," Huffman told NPR. He said the computer engineer in him — not the CEO — believed he could fix Reddit's code and reclaim the site from trolls. Huffman was installed as the new permanent CEO in July 2015.

The number of employees at Reddit doubled in the year that followed, which helped Huffman address the company's myriad issues. Reddit improved a feature to block users and debuted a quarantine for offensive content, making it harder for people to find.

The company also launched Android and iOS apps, and within one year, more than half of the site's users viewed Reddit on mobile devices. Monthly unique visitors ballooned to 243 million.

Ohanian and Huffman remain close friends.

The Nature Conservancy and Techstars just announced a partnership to create the Techstars Sustainability Accelerator. Amy and I were part of the public announcement this week in Denver. Both organizations are important to us so it’s a joy to be involved in having them work together.

Amy and I have been supporters of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) since we started our relationship in 1990. So has my partner Seth and his wife Greeley, who is currently a trustee on the TNC Colorado board. A key shared value of ours is protecting our planet and we are huge fans of TNC’s science-based approach.

Over the years, we’ve been personally involved in a number of projects, such as protecting the Anchor River in Anchor Point, Alaska (the town Amy grew up in until she was eight.) Amy went to Tanzania and Kenya in 2009 with TNC to increase capacity of TNC non-profit partners. We supported an Anchor Point Fellow at TNC’s Berlin office and an internship in Australia through Wellesley College. Heather Tallis, TNC’s Global Managing Director and Lead Scientist for Strategy Innovation, generously participated in our August 2017 Anchor Point Fellowship in Global Leadership Conference. Amy is currently on the TNC Global Campaign Committee and on the TNC Africa Affinity Group for Women and Girls. We also support TNC’s work with indigenous women environmental community leaders in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. TNC’s global reach makes it a very exciting organization to support.

At a TNC event at our house in June 2016, I had a conversation with Mark Tercek, TNC’s CEO, around innovation. Mark joined TNC nine years ago after a long and successful career at Goldman Sachs. One of my favorite ideas of his is that we can ensure more financial resources go toward conservation by getting the world to fully appreciate the opportunity to invest in nature. We had a good exchange about a number of creative approaches TNC taking to conservation and sustainability and I started referring to Mark as Nature’s Investment Banker.

Earlier this year, Amy encouraged me to get together with Brian McPeek, TNC’s Chief Conservation Officer, who is based in Denver. She described the conversation around technology and innovation she’d had with Brian, and suggested that I should talk to him about Techstars.

Brian and I got together with the goal of batting around a bunch of ideas around what he was trying to accomplish. Without realizing it, he was describing the domain of things that Techstars has addressed for many of our corporate partners. We left the meeting feeling like the idea of a Techstars TNC collaboration could be powerful.

Brian and his team went deep on things very quickly, understanding Techstars and how a Sustainability Accelerator would work. Even though Techstars has expanded around the world, we’ve never expanded in Colorado beyond our Techstars Boulder program, which was the very first location in which we ran an accelerator. We’ve talked about doing an accelerator in Denver, but never had a compelling reason to do it. But with Brian and TNC’s involvement, doing an accelerator in Denver became exciting to us – especially given the focus on sustainability that clearly differentiated it from what we were working on in the Boulder accelerator. It’s now a reality and Mark does a great job talking about our goals and approach in his post about The First Tech Accelerator For Sustainability.

In the tech world, founders (and investors) are always talking about changing the world, with an implication that what they want to be doing is something important, meaningful, and long lasting. In the past few years, there has been increasing dissonance between these words and what results from so-called disruptive innovations, where what we are really creating are companies that improve online ad-targeted by 1%, or create yet another mobile app that distracts our attention from the physical world. This isn’t a denigration of those companies, but rather a comment on the disconnect between the desire to change the world against the reality of working on things that time and humanity will likely forget quickly.

There’s an obvious question:“Are there opportunities to not just do good, but to have big outcomes?” I have a deeply held belief that large and successful companies can be built while solving global challenges. It’s not just a feel good thing, but a powerful approach to creating companies. And, if you take it to its natural conclusion, we ultimately are looking for for-profit companies that can be themselves sustainable and important.

For any entrepreneur interested in working on things that improve our planet, there’s now an accelerator for that. And I’m excited to be involved in the collaboration to do this between two organizations that are extremely important to me.

Also published on Medium.