(BNS) John Borthwick Of Betaworks

Summary

Tech Brew Ride Home – (BNS) John Borthwick Of Betaworks
Podcast Date: September 13, 2025
Host: Morning Brew / Interviewer Brian
Guest: John Borthwick (CEO/Founder, Betaworks)

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Episode Theme & Overview

This episode is a sweeping oral history of the early Internet scene in New York City, as recounted by John Borthwick—technologist, entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Betaworks. The conversation covers Borthwick’s journey from computer-loving UK kid to influencer in NYC’s tech community, his pivotal projects (like AdaWeb, Total New York, Photolog, Betaworks), and his observations about past and present waves of technological innovation. The episode also reflects on the metaphors and mindsets that shaped each era: from seeing the Internet as “new land” to today’s AI “sense of abundance vs. constraint.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Early Inspiration & First Encounters with Tech

• Borthwick’s Nerd Roots (02:30)
  • Grew up in the UK with limited exposure to computers; gravitated to tech and nerd communities whenever possible.
  • “I did my first bit of programming on a computer which included tape cassette... I'd never say I was a programmer... but I learned to cobble things together.” (John Borthwick, 02:30)
  • First computer he loved: Early Macintosh at Wesleyan College—a moment that awakened his passion for technology and design.

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2. Academic Path and the Economics Perspective

• Studied Development Economics and MBA at Wharton (04:18–06:57)

  • Focused on the broader context of how economies develop, not just the numbers.
  • Important exposure at Wharton: Mixing with finance folks, taking time in Penn’s Computer Science Dept, meeting his wife.

• Seeing the Early Internet (05:32–07:33)

  • A pivotal moment: Visiting MIT in early 1994 to see one of the first machines on the World Wide Web.
  • “I drove back to Penn that night… I had sweaty palms on the way down because I felt I had seen the future...” (John Borthwick, 07:33)

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3. New York City’s Proto-Tech Scene in the 1990s

• Building in New York Pre-Startup Era (08:53–15:34)

  • Hosted ad-hoc gatherings in his NYC apartment for people to “see the Internet.”
  • First endeavors: Bridging creative and nerd communities; forming collaborations between technologists and artists.

• AdaWeb: Collaborating with Artists Online (15:29–18:38)

  • Notable project co-founded with artists like Jenny Holzer.
  • “She said, ‘young man, I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. But if you drive upstate, I’ll cook you chili and you can show me your Internet.’” (John Borthwick, 17:15)
  • Demonstrated the Internet’s potential as a medium for creative collaboration despite technical limitations.

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4. The Rise and Experimentation of Total New York

• Total New York: Pioneering Urban Web Content (18:43–23:52)
  • Inspired by London’s “Time Out,” Borthwick and team launched a guide for New York.
  • Early studio model: Multiple projects incubated, collaborative culture combining media, tech, and art.
  • Creative stunts to generate interest: Live event road trips (e.g., Silicon Valley–to–Silicon Valley), daily web diaries, and novel uses of webcams and chat.
  • “We had to make the website compelling—we had to make the web compelling.” (John Borthwick, ~21:00)
  • Navigational metaphors: Moving beyond the idea of “maps” and “directories” towards native web concepts.

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5. From Startups to AOL and the Dot-Com Bubble

• Distribution & Scaling: The AOL Acquisition (24:50–32:01)

  • AOL’s purchase of Total New York and associated projects was about gaining local web content and distribution.
  • “AWOL bought us and it was about distribution, and it was about capabilities around local.” (John Borthwick, 28:19)
  • Early web assumed many metaphors from offline life—maps, yellow pages, channels.

• Life Inside AOL (32:01–36:38)

  • AOL as an online “walled garden”—from chat rooms and email to “channels” echoing television.
  • AOL’s meteoric rise and its own bubble, characterized by a business/deal culture rather than technical innovation.
  • “AOL was very much a business-driven culture… deal cowboy and very much like run fast or shit done kind of culture.” (John Borthwick, 36:38)

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6. The Dot-Com Crash & Rebuilding New York Tech Scene

• Bubble Burst & Media Backlash (38:39–40:54)
  • After the crash, tech in New York went into a “nuclear winter,” but Borthwick saw the Internet as just getting started.
  • Observed the dialectical nature of media: narrative pendulum swings from hype to takedown.

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7. Social Web Pioneering: Photolog and the Next Generation

• Investing and Innovating in Social Publishing (41:16–44:57)

  • Early angel investment in Photolog, a pre-Instagram photo social network focused on curation (one photo per day).
  • Limitations (bandwidth, cost) fostered creativity and a focus on quality.
  • “It was both a limitation on the costs, but it was also social design... your one photo today really matters. Curate.” (John Borthwick, 43:21)

• Constraints Foster Creativity (46:49–49:09)

  • Early tech (text-based MUDs, etc.) showed that limitations force novel approaches.
  • “So much creativity comes out of those constraints... MUDs and MOOs... illustrated that you could do this just with text.” (John Borthwick, 46:49)

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8. From Web to AI: Abundance & Constraint

• AI as the Next Successor Technology (49:09–54:16)
  • Tension between sense of abundance (endless possibility with AI) and resource constraints.
  • John’s advice: In times of expansion, push boundaries, but remain aware overshooting can occur.
  • “Balancing those things (abundance vs. constraint) is one of the key jobs of the entrepreneur.” (John Borthwick, 49:52)
  • “You always overshoot areas of investment… inherent in the entire business.” (John Borthwick, 51:32)

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9. The Betaworks Model: Studio, Community, Accelerator

• Betaworks Origin, Philosophy & Today (54:44–58:29)
  • Began in 2007–08 as a “venture studio” with a thesis-driven approach, quickly influential in social web (Tumblr, Bitly, Giphy, Dots, etc.).
  • Evolved from building companies in-house to a hybrid model: “thematic accelerators” (AI interfaces, agents, machine learning, etc.).
  • Betaworks as a New York community hub: events, founder gatherings, a space for collaboration and serendipity.
  • “If you come to Betaworks today… we do a ton of events here… a hub of activity around AI, machine learning, robotics, and deepish tech.” (John Borthwick, 57:54)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On encountering the Web’s potential:

  “I drove back to Penn that night... I had sweaty palms on the way down because I felt I had seen the future and that I needed to... get going because it was going to happen.”
  (John Borthwick, 07:33)

• On early creative Internet work:

  “If you drive upstate, I will cook you chili and you can show me your Internet.”
  (Jenny Holzer, as recounted by Borthwick, 17:15)

• On AOL’s internal culture:

  "It was very much a business culture, deal cowboy and very much like run fast or shit done kind of culture."
  (John Borthwick, 36:38)

• On the pendulum shift in media:

  “Once you've told the sort of vision story of the Internet, the next story you need to tell is the takedown story. The pendulum just sort of swings in the media narrative.”
  (John Borthwick, 40:54)

• On social design and constraint:

  “The one photo every day was both a limitation on costs, but it was also, it was social design... your one photo today really matters. Curate.”
  (John Borthwick, 43:21)

• On creative constraints:

  “So much creativity comes out of those constraints... MUDs and MOOs... illustrated that you could do this just with text.”
  (John Borthwick, 46:49)

• On entrepreneurship in an era of abundance vs. constraint:

  “You have this sense that you’ve discovered a new land... an entirely new world that’s opened up and you can build whatever you want in that new world. On the flip side, there are real constraints in what you can do... Balancing those things is one of the key jobs of the entrepreneur.”
  (John Borthwick, 49:52)

• On Betaworks today:

  “If you come to Betaworks today... we do a ton of events here... a hub of activity around AI, machine learning, robotics, and sort of deepish tech.”
  (John Borthwick, 57:54)

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Notable Timestamps for Major Segments

• Early Computer & Internet Experiences: 02:30–08:06
• NYC’s Tech Scene & AdaWeb: 11:26–18:38
• Total New York Origin & Experiments: 18:43–23:52
• AOL Acquisition & Web Culture: 24:50–36:38
• Dot-Com Crash & Rebuilding: 38:39–41:16
• Social Web/Photolog: 41:16–44:57
• Creativity via Constraints: 46:49–49:09
• AI, Abundance & Constraints: 49:09–54:16
• Betaworks Evolution & Today's Programs: 54:44–58:29

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Tone & Style

The episode is nostalgic, candid, and insightful, with a conversational, slightly irreverent flavor. Borthwick is self-effacing and reflective, with story-driven exposition, while Host Brian steers the discussion broad and deep into tech history, always seeking the human angle beneath the tech.

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Final Takeaway

John Borthwick’s story weaves together decades of technological, artistic, and entrepreneurial innovation—demonstrating the enduring importance of creative risk-taking, learning from constraints, and building community roots, both then and now. For anyone interested in the DNA of New York’s tech culture, or in navigating today’s boundaryless landscape of AI, this episode is rich with perspective, actionable wisdom, and memorable anecdotes.

Transcript

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[Interviewer Brian]

One of the promises of AI from an investing standpoint in terms of what's the business model? Who are the winners going to be? Is this sense of abundance potentially in terms of what it can achieve?

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, it's really interesting because you have this like, sort of, you know, you have this early days of the Internet, you would just have this and use these metaphors to get there. But you have things like sort of sensei, you've discovered a new land, right? And that is an entirely new world that's opened up and that you can build whatever you want in, right? And then on the flip side is that there's some real constraints in terms of what you can do, what you're capable of doing with technology, what you can do, what capital. You have all those constraints. And so like balancing those things is like sort of one of the key jobs of the entrepreneur. But it's also, you know, it is always, you know, them keeping in mind sort of the higher order. Like, so like why am I here? What am I actually building, I think is absolutely central to ending up building things which matter and building things which change the world.

[Interviewer Brian]

John Borthwick, thanks for talking to us today.

[John Borthwick]

Pleasure.

[Interviewer Brian]

I want to do a little bit of this Is yous Life. So let's go all the way back and just sort of ask you real quick, were you a computer kid growing up? Were you a into tech and gadgets and things like that?

[John Borthwick]

I was a nerd. I was a computer kid. I did my first bit of programming on a computer which included tape cassette. And I would never say that I was a programmer. As I grew up, I sort of ended up sort of scripting more sort of like figuring out how to cobble together and use computer code to make one thing choose something else. And, you know, I. I grew up in. I grew up in the uk, half English, half French, Not a lot of exposure to computers or nerds, but gravitated towards them whenever I could. Had a sort of like creative family. So a lot of stuff on the arts. And so between notes and arts, I kept myself busy.

[Interviewer Brian]

I sometimes ask people their first computer, like the one that made them fall in love with computing or whatever. And so since you just, you know, said uk, Europe, like, can I ask you that question? Like, was it a Sinclair, a Commodore? Like, what was. What was your first computer?

[John Borthwick]

It was Commodore, but I did not love it. I mean, yeah, the first computer I loved, which was not mine, but I was. When I was in college, I was a card. Went to Wes in Connecticut and somebody there in my dorm got one of the early Macintoshes, and I just loved that. And so the combination of the design, the gui, the everything from the keyboard to I think it was still running out of the clutch, you know, the feel of the keyboard and the little happy guy when you boot it up.

[Interviewer Brian]

At Wesleyan, you studied economics, is that right?

[John Borthwick]

Economics, not history?

[Interviewer Brian]

Well, I was an art history minor, but economics is often a major that folks say, in retrospect, if I could have done that, that would have been very useful. What about studying economics has sort of informed your work?

[John Borthwick]

So, Brian, I did development economics.

[Interviewer Brian]

Hmm. Explain what that is then.

[John Borthwick]

So basically the, you know, like usaid, I've got it. So essentially economic development and how development happens across different geographies in different countries and how countries, how they trade, how they relate to each other. So it was very much that I had no interest in, like accounting or a balance sheet or understanding sort of that side of economics. I did some of that later when I went to Wharton, went to grad school at Wharton, and I did some of that there.

[Interviewer Brian]

Wharton. Was an mba.

[John Borthwick]

Did an MBA at Wharton, went to Wharton. You know, I was kind of fish out of water there because, you know, mostly finance people, quite a few nerds, but I, I enjoyed it. I spent a bunch of time in the computer science department down in Penn and did some classes there, and I met my wife there, which was the best thing that me. That came out of one. And. And then in. In 94, I was graduating summer of 94, and in spring of 94, I want to say February, March, a friend of mine who was working at the AI lab up at MIT, so not the media lab. There was an AI lab back in 94. And he said, hey, we just wired up a. We've got a computer that's on the World Wide Web and you can come see it. And so I drove to Boston to see the World Wide Web because couldn't find. There has to have been a terminal I've had somewhere, but we're talking about. I think it was an SGI box. And so I drove about whatever it was, five hours to Boston to sit down and I went to a few websites, including the web Louvre, if you remember that.

[Interviewer Brian]

Yes.

[John Borthwick]

And Nicholas Pinochet, if I remember right.

[Interviewer Brian]

What was that?

[John Borthwick]

Nicholas Pinoch was the guy who curated the Wet Louvre.

[Interviewer Brian]

Right. So essentially the Louvre put pictures at this point, because did they even have video for that first sight anyway?

[John Borthwick]

Oh, my gosh. No, it was exactly. It was not the Louvre. It was this guy Nicholas, who was a nerd in Paris and he was just like, I love the Louvre. So I'm going to put this up on. And the images kind of like took, you know, about four minutes to render on this big SGI box.

[Interviewer Brian]

And we're. And we're postage stamp sized and we're.

[John Borthwick]

Yes, we're tiny in the middle of a page. And I drove back to Penn that night and I had sweaty palms on the way down because I felt I had seen the future and that it would be. I need to get. I need to like drop out of school when I needed to just get going because it was going to happen. It was right in front of us. And I was. I was right. But took a bit of time.

[Interviewer Brian]

Had you done some consulting or something? A little bit.

[John Borthwick]

Did some. Did some between undergrad, between Western and Pan. Undergrad. I did consulting with a sort of quant firm here in New York. It's called Wyman. And you know, I ended up doing a bunch of sort of, you know, computer work or data modeling work for them. There were very quantish. So these were kind of. These were, you know, on PCs. It was not quant, as they call it.

[Interviewer Brian]

Not with the AI and deep learning and stuff. So we're talking about the 94, 95ish era. So this is still dial up. And the web is extremely nascent. We're not even in close to like the dot com bubble era. But you are in New York at this point?

[John Borthwick]

I'm in New York. I'm in New York. I graduate from Wharton. If you're interested. I just remembered it's downstairs. I can go get this artifact. But. So I'm in New York and I want to start a web Company and I went to the Worldwide Web Symposium, which was packed with a whole bunch of, I believe in Illinois. It was packed with a whole bunch of engineers and researchers. So we're talking about like very, very early days. Not seeing the. What boom.

[Interviewer Brian]

Let's see. Ah, I'm going to say for people. Listen, it's the www conference 94. Mosaic and the. Pull out a bit. Mosaic and something something. Mosaic and the Web Advanced Proceedings, Volume two. Yes.

[John Borthwick]

I no longer have volume one. And so. Yeah, and so this was the second International World Wide Web Conference. And so did that. And yeah, the other thing I want to show you, you're going to edit this, right, Brian?

[Interviewer Brian]

Not for the Internet History podcast, but for some of the other stuff.

[John Borthwick]

Sure, yeah. Because while I'm down here, I just want to show you this. So one of the things that was crazy at that period was that some of the magazines this was, PC Computing, thought that they could draw a map of the web because navigation, as you think through sort of early metaphors, like how you like how you get around this world, was like a question that people asked earlier.

[Interviewer Brian]

Like the map metaphor. Yeah, yeah.

[John Borthwick]

Wow. There's map of. We've got actually two of them here. And these are from 94. And that's my glasses upstairs. But like Yahoo is on there. I can send you a photo if you request it. But Yahoo's on there. But it's not yahoo.com, it's their Stanford.

[Interviewer Brian]

Stanford account. And by the way, Yahoo wasn't even a search engine at that point. It was just a directory. So again, continuing the sort of like the analog metaphors of maps and directories, as opposed to even what we would think of as search now.

[John Borthwick]

Correct, correct. And I think that one of the patterns that I've seen through the world of technology, in the world of startups and just as we've gone through sort of cycles from the Internet to mobile to AI, is just how incredibly stubborn we are as humans to want to see something new through the metaphors of something.

[Interviewer Brian]

Can I come back to what New York is like in 94, 95? Is there a sense, and I'm not even saying is there a sense that there's a tech scene happening, but is there a sense that something is happening around technology? Are there people, artists, media folk, whatever. Is there a sense that there's a new era dawning?

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, so there's. There was a ton of activity happening on the left coast. Right. And so like starting to bubble on the left coast and we were starting to see pieces of it shades of it in New York, right? So I graduated, came back to. Came back to New York. Came to New York and you know, I had. I had like a flow of people coming through my apartment wanting to see the Internet. And you know, a bunch of them wanted. Would come by and wanted domain names or like, well, like, how can I get my, you know, how can get a piece of turf here, by the way?

[Interviewer Brian]

How are you serving up the Internet to them? Are you dialing in somewhere or do you have a T1 line or something?

[John Borthwick]

No, no, no, no. What was the Pipex? It was the thing called Pipeline, which was one of the early ISPs, but we're talking about modem and we're talking about dialogue, right? And so did I managed to get panics. Do you remember panics? Pnix? No, early, early neural kind speech. So anyway, so managed git connectivity. You know, I. So a lot of people in the. What I would describe as the sort of nerd creative community in New York starting to get interesting and sort of doing sort of informal meetups. People, friends getting together and trying to figure out what is this thing and how can we start things right. I think quite a few people, given the depths of experience that New York hazard, sort of, you know, media, advertising agency world. Quite a few people in that world, you know, starting to think about it because. Starting to think about, okay, how does this relate to media and everything that relates to that people. And I think people in publishing probably less so for the bit and then creative people. So. And I, I gravitated very much towards, you know, I felt like I thought at the time this is a fundamentally new medium and that we are. I'm naturally gonna like, put my assumptions. We're calling it web pages. We're talking about navigation, we're doing all the things that are suggestive that we sort of know and understand what this medium is. But I was like, this thing is just a, you know, it's just an alien thing that is completely new. And so I thought that what we should do is. What I wanted to do initially was work with creative people to create creative projects on the Internet. And so the very first thing I did was a site which I started working on, which was called Father Web, named after Itabayan.

[Interviewer Brian]

Let me, Let me just spell that out for people listening. ADA Web. ADA Web. Yes.

[John Borthwick]

A D, E, A W E b dot com. It's still actually around because we ended up giving it to the Walker Museum. And so it still sort of functions which, you know, many of the commercial things I ended up doing after that, no longer around. But the first thing I did was Arda Web. And so the principle of ardueb was very simply, we were going to work with artists and put an artist and an engineer together and see if they could make something. So the first artist that I wanted to work with was a woman called Jenny Holzer. And Holzer and Jenny's work, which is. I loved her work. I had no idea how to get to her, but I thought her work was fascinating and brilliant. But she worked with language. If you look her up, she puts these like, she puts what she has a series that she refers to as truisms, which are sort of like very short sentences that are highly provocative and that she puts in public places.

[Interviewer Brian]

Sort of like Barbara Kruger a little bit.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, yeah. She would not. She would say different. Yeah.

[Interviewer Brian]

Not to be. Not casting aspersions. Sorry.

[John Borthwick]

Yes. Yeah, artists do. So, I mean, here is. I remember seeing her project that she did in Times Square, which I can, you know, just drop in the chat. Yeah. But she. I thought her work was brilliant. And because it was sort of so fascinating because it was just text, I thought this can actually work, given the limitations of the, of the Internet at the time. So anyway, so I, I just, I. I think I tried Kruger too, but I, I thought, okay, I'm going to try and get her phone number or try. So I managed to, through somebody get her phone number and I called her officer and I spoke for about 15 minutes and told her that I wanted to do. I wanted to do an Internet project. And she said to me, she said, young man, I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. But she said, if you drive upstate, I will cook you chili and you can show me your Internet. So packed up a car, rented some modems and went upstate and showed Jenny the Internet. And then we ended up creating a project with her. We then ended up making about 15 other projects. And then after about six months, I started the first commercial thing. So that was kind of the early.

[Interviewer Brian]

Early days for me was the first commercial thing that was total New York or.

[John Borthwick]

Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just think about local information and like getting around and so.

[Interviewer Brian]

Yeah, again, well, hey, again, the navigation metaphor.

[John Borthwick]

Again, navigation.

[Interviewer Brian]

So explain. Explain a little bit what total New York was.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, so we started Total New York. We really started a few months later. So it started at the end of 94. And then I think, I mean, we, you know, I found a bunch of things in the scrapbook. I think we went live in early 95, but the, you know, Total New York, really, the inspiration behind Total New York, or the idea behind Total New York was there is. There's going to be. When I grew up in London, it was Time out and I was like, there has to be a great, you know, there has to be a great site around New York City. And so, you know, we started building to New York and, you know, I got together with a small team and, you know, we ended up taking the same office as the other white people. So we did it together. And then I very quickly sort of like started thinking about this as a studio. And so, you know, in a funny sense, I mean, it sort of is this, as my wife says, there's a lot of like, underpinnings of beta works because, you know, very outset, I was trying to create sort of a studio, like atmosphere where we could have several different things that we were building and told was a local news, content, information site.

[Interviewer Brian]

It is interesting like that. Again, we're using metaphors, studios, like with the arts and how you're experimenting, throwing things against the wall as opposed to this idea of an incubator, which is sort of. We'll come back to that. Let me segue through some things a little bit.

[John Borthwick]

I would also say just sort of ground that. Right?

[Interviewer Brian]

Yeah.

[John Borthwick]

Or just take that a bit further. Right. So we've told New York. Right. We started up and there was this small team of Dygosia and was with Ted Wirth and this guy. And we got together and started building this sort of first version of it. And this woman, Janice, joined the crew. And so we were sort of this motley crew of creative technologists who were really interested in like, figuring out how media. How stuff about New York, but how media would be in this thing. And so. And we had to figure out how to make this stuff pay for itself. And we had to figure out how we could actually get people interested in the web and going to this website. So not only did we have to, like, make the website compelling, we had to make the web compelling. And so, you know, a lot of the early things we did at Total New York were actually, you know, sort of content, but they were sort of. They were experiments, parentheses, stunts to be able to get people to use the Internet. And so, like we did in 95, 96, you know, we did this idea where we. I said, let's do a road trip from Silicon Valley to Silicon Valley. And so we found this guy, Greg Allen. We put a camera on his helmet, we put A laptop on his motorbike. And he drove from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. And on the way, he stopped creating the daily journal of interviews with people who were critical in creating the Internet. So, like, he went to, I think, DARPA and met with Ray Tomlinson, who created the ad sign and interviewed Ray and wrote a post, a blog post, not known as a blog post back then, a journal post, because he was writing a daily diary of the Internet. And so. And what happened was the traditional media people followed us because they were like, this is crazy. And it also helps us explain the Internet to people. And we were like, it helps tell people why they should get on the Internet. And then hopefully they'll come to our website too. So you could see that it was kind of a. It was an amazing time. It just felt so like, and free and creative and like, you know, you could, like, cobble together anything and people were doing things to achieve. People were just, like, figuring stuff out. It was just, you know, it was so. It was a very. It was an amazing creative time. It was also a time when you had to, like, you had to justify the whole stack.

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[Interviewer Brian]

Well, I was going to say not only that, I mean, we can get into, like, the technological roadblocks that you have to hurdle. But it seems to me that one lesson there is it's a product that you have to educate the user on not only how to use, but why they want to use it. And number two, there would be a lesson there about distribution, which what I was going to get to was I think you get acquired by AOL or digital. AOL Digital City or something around this time. And that would be a lesson of they at the time have distribution for doing the things that you're talking about, like getting the audience that you're looking for. I don't know if I even formed a question there, but tell me about the lessons of that. Of teaching. Finding the audience, but also teaching the audience why they need it. And then distribution.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think the distribution at the, you know, the highest level. Distribution for the actual Internet. Right. Because what we did is we ended up building up Tone New York. We had a whole bunch of content on it. We had some sort of what I would describe as directory bits, content, but it was a lot of content. And we did a lot of these events. Right. So I described the Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley thing. We did another thing where we did, I think, the first mayor to mayor. Mayor of Boston, mayor of New York. So Giuliani was mayor of New York and we worked with Sun Microsystems and did a sort of C U C Me direct conversation, public conversation between the mayors of the two cities again to start to, you know, illustrate the Internet. Eric Schmidt was over at Sun Microsystems then and he was the sort of at Mark's Cafe, which we wired up a terminal there. And he showed up, but Giuliani ended up not showing up. So with the mayor of Boston sitting there with Eric Schmidt. And it was fun and interesting and weird. So we did a lot of these events and these things to try and get people to both understand the Internet and to start using the Internet and start building the company, seeing if we could make some money. Because these events were also ways to that sponsors and advertisers could sort of understand how it would make sense for them to back an Internet project. It was definitely coming from experimental ad budgets, but it was, you know, it was before there was any sort of quantification of clicks or even really demonstration of ad banners. Right. I mean, I think so fast forward to, you know, the AOL acquiring us. So Airworld bought us and us being the whole company rental studio, which we called Web Partner Studios, LTP Studio. And so at that point we had told New York we had Art Web. And then we had created this thing that was called Spanker, that was a daily blog where we had a very creative writer who would basically, as they said back in the old days, say back in England, take the piss out of somebody on the Internet. And so Basically take a GeoCities page and write a piece of editorial around.

[Interviewer Brian]

It, spank it in the gawker era, in the Gawker era, they call that snark, right?

[John Borthwick]

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was very snarky and fun. But I had to explain that because it's not. Your listeners may leave with. Yeah, it was. So they AWOL bought it, and it was about distribution. It was about distribution, and it was about capabilities around local. Right. The. The early days of the Internet, you certainly noticed, but it went through. We went through these waves of, okay, the Internet's going to change everything. Okay, the Internet's going to change commerce. The Internet's going to change how people get around. The Internet's going to change local. And so there was these sort of waves of interest, those peaks. Everybody thinks about the Internet wave, the initial Internet wave of capital of interest, as being just one thing, but it was really all like, it's a fractal sort of all these little peaks in there. And so there was a ton of interest which went on for about a year in local. And so there was a thing called city search. And the airwall guys who had done were a terrific on ramp to the Internet themselves. They had not done a lot in local. So they showed up and they said, hey, we want to do a big local thing. Want to buy you guys, want to make you the anchor site, and then have you. John and the team help run the digital cities thing, which was their local thing.

[Interviewer Brian]

I want to point out, again, for historical context, that one of the metaphors is geography. In 30 years on the web kind of blew that up. The Internet blew that up. But the analogy at the time was things like the Yellow Pages, which was a $20 billion industry or so. Things like, again, directories, but local guides and things like that. There was a sense that you could replicate this on the web as well. And that's sort of what you were experimenting with and poking at.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was happening very much at the time. You know, Elon never came by Total New York, but his brother Kimball came by.

[Interviewer Brian]

I want to point out that Elon's first startup was something like this, like a local directory site thing.

[John Borthwick]

And do you remember who he sold it to?

[Interviewer Brian]

It was Zip2.

[John Borthwick]

Compaq.

[Interviewer Brian]

Compaq, the computer.

[John Borthwick]

Compact computers, yeah.

[Interviewer Brian]

Zip2 was the company. Yeah, look that up, everybody.

[John Borthwick]

Why would a computer company buy that? It was crazy, right? But it was gained distribution. It was like sort of like the idea. It's like AT&T buying Time Warner. Right. Or Time Warner buying aol. It's kind of like the same sort of like people trying to go up and down the stack and like control distribution and, you know, content and media.

[Interviewer Brian]

Can you give me a little bit of color about aol? Just so aol again, for historical context, was like sort of the first big Internet behemoth, even if it didn't last. But there was a period where AOL again, as a sort of meeting of tech and media was the biggest game in town. Bought AOL Time Warner around the year 2000. It's like, okay, this is the future right before the bubbles about to burst. But I think you worked there even after the bubbles bursting. So give me a sense, even with a New York City lens, a little bit of what AOL was like to work for, what they were trying to do, anything like that.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, yeah. So I ended up staying at AOL for a couple of years. I thought I would stay for a couple of months. Right. I was just like, I was keen to do the figure out how. We ended up deep in negotiations with TCI and they wanted to buy it and they kind of like dumped us at the altar. And aol, we also knew and so we ended up doing a deal with aol. But it sort of, you know, as a startup and with startup founders, you put yourself in the mode of, okay, we're going to exit and the whole team and everybody's kind of in that mode and it becomes hard to like click out of that. So we ended up doing this deal with aol. I joined aol, thought I'd stay for a few months. Always worked a day well from New York, so remained part of, and built the New York office. But part of the team went down there a lot. So there was. Virginia was Reston and Tyson's Corner. Virginia, the AWOL team, like when I first went down there was still, it was still fairly young, but it was Steve Case, you know, was at the helm of aol. And you know, Steve had built AOL as this, you know, he had a sort of vision of an online almost gaming network.

[Interviewer Brian]

And it was, it literally was a dial in gaming company at some point in its life. Yes, yeah, yeah.

[John Borthwick]

And you know, and they introduced email early on. So they had native email embedded in there. Email and chat rooms became incredibly sort of, you know, work back then was sticky. Right. They became sort of these retention vehicles. And so then they, you know, they grew out the team. And I ended up working with a guy called Ted Le Altis who's, who's still around and who's like built a big sports empire down in D.C. with a Schuler and we bought Pittman So, you know, when Pittman came on board, really, I think Steve and the AOL team sort of had this insight or believed that, okay, we got this Internet thing, we got this dial up game thing. People are spending a long time on email, a lot of time on chat. There's this Internet thing. When people get onto our thing, they use that connectivity to open up the Internet things. Let's see if we can bring the Internet into aol. Right. And there was sort of this brief period of like probably two years where it felt like AOL could be the Internet. And then the Internet ended up becoming, you know, bigger than aol. And there were lots of other ways to get into the Internet. And so I think that that was sort of peak. AOL hubris was AWOL can be the Internet. And you know, Bob. And Bob Pittman, you know, he was, you know, part of his genius was he was a media person. And he was like, okay, you've got all these people who are looking at this thing. Let's channelize it. And Bob and Ted and Barry and these. The team basically created these media channels and said, okay, when people come and check their email, they want to go to some news, let's put news here. They want to go sports, they want to go to classifieds. As you were saying, just category by category. Let's see if we can turn this into a media experience.

[Interviewer Brian]

But there's another, there's another metaphor there of channels. So tv.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, channels and tv. Also metaphors of radio, like seeping in there. But yeah, a lot of tv. Yeah. And these guys were media guys. But Bob. And, you know, the media guys came from New York and so. And the telecom guys really were down at the jungle. So it was kind of a culture clash even then a bit. But that sort of accelerated once we acquired Time Warner.

[Interviewer Brian]

AOL folks were known cowboys is a term that is thrown around those Virginia folks. There were some sharp elbows thrown in terms of like, you know, the legend is that you were a startup, you would raise $100 million or something and you'd give it all to AOL. Anything about the AOL culture and compared to, let's say, startup culture and stuff like that today.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah. So, I mean, look, I think that the AOL culture was very much a culture, sort of what I describe as media business development. And it was not technology driven culture. And I think even when people like Lincoln Driessen, he doesn't talk. You know, he was briefly the CTO of awa and you know, people from the west coast or People who were sort of steeped in engineering culture culture found that pretty sort of jarring and just it was very much a business culture, business driven culture, deal culture, deal cowboy and very much like run fast or shit done kind of culture. You're alluding to sort of these sort of round trip deals that we, the AOL team did. We dealt with a lot of up and coming startups. So the Amazons or the ebays of the world or the, you know, any of the pet.com or like any of these sort of category based startups, you know, we go to them and we'd say to them etoys, we'd say to them, hey, you want more distribution? Why don't we invest in you and you invest in some distribution. Basically you take some piece of the investment and it was usually a large piece but not 100%. And you come back and buy services from us or buy placement from us. So on one hand you can go, that's really fucked up. Yes. And take a look at anthropic and OpenAI and the round trip deals. Microsoft puts a billion dollars into OpenAI and part of that comes with a round trip deal to buy X amount of compute on Izeo. And so this stuff, is the music still going?

[Interviewer Brian]

One more thing on this sort of era, when the dot com bubble burst. I was here in New York City at that point and I remember a sense of, especially in media and other industries. Oh, I'm glad that fad is over. But then there were other folks that were like, that fad's not over, no one's stopping using the Internet. So your sense of the, the nuclear winter, of the bubble bursting and then the tech resurgence.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, yeah. So at the time I was obviously I was still within aol. So I'd stayed and, and then I ended up after Time, the merger with Time Warner and there's one cycle of management. I ended up moving over to Time Warner and taking CTO's job there. And so I sort of had a very different sort of view, you know, of the approach to like see the world. Look, my view was, is that the Internet was just getting going, none of this was stopping. But it was brutal in New York for the startup community because you know, the startup community didn't have a lot of like depths to it and a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of companies shut down and there wasn't any sort of the what jobs or alternatives then to do rather than go back into traditional media. And then as you're alluding to Right. Like, media has always had this really complicit relationship with the Internet, which is both. Both, hey, you're new and interesting. I want to write about you, but also you may be the sense of my demise. So anything bad that happens to you is good, is something I want to write about in. And so, you know, there were a lot of. I mean, the other thing is that, you know, sort of. There's always a sort of dialectical sort of like once you've told the sort of vision story of the Internet, the next story you need to tell is the takedown story. Right. It's just like. So the pendulum just sort of swings in the media narrative. And so the media narrative was, I think, was all too happy that this was sort of the end of the. That pesky little Internet thing is gone.

[Interviewer Brian]

Right away in terms of the next era of what the Internet and the web becomes. Can I jump to Photolog, which is sort of in the social era of what technology is becoming. Give me a little bit about Photolog and then let's jump to the beta.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah. So I had stayed, even when I took the CTO's job at time Warner, I was very involved with. I stayed plugged into the New York tech community as much as I could. And I did that through friends, hanging out, learning. I also did that through a bit of an angel investing. And so I became an angel investor in Prolong. Scott Hman started at Vlog, basically Scott as an old friend, and he had done itraffic, which was an early sort of agency. And then he. I got together with him and he said, I've got two ideas. One's called Photog, one's called Meetup. And I had also done a seed investment in Blogger, which was Apple Williams startup. And so I was totally fascinated in publishing, in self publishing, in these, you know, because go back that Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley experience, right. This idea of daily publishing was an idea which really fascinated me and distributed publishing. And then we, you know, later, fast forward at Beta Works, we became early. We were very early in Twitter, so you can see the themes like tying together and emerging from the early days. So Photolog was an idea that Scott had, which I thought was wonderful, and was to basically post a single photo every day. And it was a social network for photos. This was before there was Instagram, before there was mobile browsers, before there was iPhones. This was very, very early on. And Scott got his friend Adam Slifer, who I also knew. And Adam was from 6 degrees, which was one of the early yeah, I've.

[Interviewer Brian]

Never spoken to anyone at 6 degrees. Yes.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, yeah. So Adam Cipher and Andrew Weinrich, I think.

[Interviewer Brian]

Yes.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing how you remember this stuff. And so Adam Cypher stepped in and started working with Scott and started building Photolog and I, you know, wrote a C check and I was fascinated with it. Fast forward Photolog became a huge phenomena in Brazil. Like you would, you know, Adam went to Brazil and there were like kids wanting him to sign. They didn't have mobile phones back then, but sign something like give them an autograph. I mean, it was just like it was a cultural phenomena in Brazil and in South America. It did not become a cultural phenomena in the US because it got eclipsed by Flickr. And Flickr had a lot of the same properties, but Flickr would let you post multiple photos every day. So. But, you know, the one photo every day was both a sort of a limitation on the costs, but it was also, it was social design. It was much more that it was basically Brian Cure one photo today. It really matters. Curate. And there was also the beginning of a photograph there. And so the idea of having I wouldn't want to see all my friends Flickr photos every day in a feed, but there was the beginning of again, metaphor feed and beginning of sort of like reverse cron feed. That blogging idea starting to come together and take shape. And so, yes, that was folklore.

[Interviewer Brian]

But it's interesting you suggested that that was also motivation for that was the constraints that you're working under in terms of bandwidth or costs and things like that. It's always interesting to me what constraints like force in terms of creativity forcing and things like that.

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[John Borthwick]

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[Interviewer Brian]

See mintmobile.com Let me jump to beta works.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, I would say, yeah, Brian, I would say really interesting about creativity, please. So much creativity comes out of those constraints. And so you look like what Josh Harris was doing at pseudo in those early days, right? That I would go down to like the place on Broadway and you could see with, you know, there was so little throughput of bandwidth, but you could have this idea of living in public. So the concept was very clear, but you didn't need to actually materialize it. Muds and moos, if you remember those things, right, these are text based chats problems which became incredibly rich in terms of their sort of creative evolution. But they were just text. There was no images. Right. And the assumption is that everybody thinks or assumes naturally you need very high fidelity. You need a 3D world before you can have a conversation, before you can have a fantasy about going into the forest. You need a 3D rendering of forest. No muds and moose illustrated that you could do this just with text. So I think the human. And there's something about transferring that into the human brain or the human creativity, which I think is incredibly powerful. So constraints, Yes. I would also say the flip side, right? I was talking with some developers about this yesterday. Like, you know, technology you have to build for the future. Like one of the things that was genius about Netscape is going back to that web louv example, right? Like right at the beginning is that they made the browser early browser could render images really well. And a lot of people were like, that's really stupid. There are no images on the Internet. There's like five places with images. And they were like, but we're building for the future in the same way. I was saying to these founders yesterday, you know, just spend on tokens. Because if you look at the cost of tokens today, it is plummeting, right? We're talking about like 500% in last year in some areas of cost reduction. So you should just max your spend on tokens in every way, shape or form. The foundation models are becoming a lot at the end, you should just assume that what you're paying today will be fractions tomorrow. Okay, so there's both constraint and spend.

[Interviewer Brian]

I want to poke at that. So I'm going to. Okay, Beta Works founded, sort of like the studio model, et cetera, et cetera. But let me, let me jump on what you were just talking about. One of the promises of AI from an investing standpoint, in terms of what's the business model, who are the winners going to be, is this sense of abundance potentially in terms of what it can achieve. So explain to me your thinking as an investor or when you're advising companies right now in present day AI space, what we're talking about, the tension of, of potential abundance versus the constraints economically or even resource wise.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, it's really interesting because you have this like sort of, you know, you have this early days of the Internet, you would just have this and use these metaphors to get there, but you have these like sort of sense that you've discovered a new land. Right. And there's an entirely new world that's opened up and that you can build whatever you want in that new world. Right. And then on the flip side is that there are some real constraints in terms of what you can do, what you're capable of doing with technology, what you can do, what capital. You have all those constraints. And so balancing those things is one of the key jobs of the entrepreneur. But it's also, it is always them, keeping in mind, sort of the higher order. Why am I here? What am I actually building, I think is absolutely central to ending up building things which matter and building things which change the world. So do you want me to go further into that or do you want me to go. You tell me. Because you asked a question which was sort of fast forwarding into the Beta Works world. So I can just.

[Interviewer Brian]

Yeah, so if you're advising someone that you're working with at betaworks today, if it's. You described virgin territory, wide open versus the constraints and things like that, what is the tension? How do you weigh that in terms of go for abundance versus the constraints that allow you to make smarter decisions and be smarter about the startup that you're building.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah. So it is, I mean, we're in a time right now. We're in a time of where it feels like there is endless abundance and people, you know, I, I will advise people, coach people to push people to like go for it because there is like, there's wide open territory right now. You can think of, you think of the last 20. I, I view AI as being a successor technology to the Internet. So it, it, it, it's being bootloaded by the Internet, it is transforming the Internet. And, and so I think that you can look at everything on the Internet that will be, that becomes AI and then you look at world that can be impacted once it becomes legible and to AI models in one way, shape or form, right, either through computer vision or through robots or through self driving vehicles or through whatever. And so you could just see the breadth of the functions and of scope. And then on the flip side, you know, the, the world right now is, I mean we have, we have a lot of challenges in our world, but in the world of tech, in the world of tech in New York, there's a tremendous amount of activity building, creation and I think that the stage that we're at is that people are really starting to say okay, what are the native properties of this medium and how can I use this to actually build radically new things, right? And we're thinking a lot today about next generation interfaces. Last year we were thinking a lot about agents. These are things which I think are going to radically transform the way we understand everything in the world, the way the world is legible to us as human beings. That said is that there will be a time when I don't foresee this tomorrow, but there will be a time when capital pulls back and sort of these cycles of inherent in the business that we were all in, in the startup world and particularly on the investor side, but inherent in the entire business is that you overshoot areas of investment. You go back to the early days of the Internet. Part of the overshoot was the overbuil in a lot of the infrastructure side. That event in turn became incredibly valuable. All that fiber, once they could put it to good use. But it was, you know, some of those Companies like the WorldComs of the World just you know, overshot and overspend and you know, didn't end up managing the, you know, the short term realities of the business and their ability to raise capital, their ability to get debt and to basically finance their business.

[Interviewer Brian]

I want to end by talking about betaworks. I keep calling it Studio Model or whatever, but it's like a clubhouse for founders. I've been to events there. Chris and I have invested in companies that have been through the betaworks program or whatever. So if you're a New York based startup right now, tell me what betaworks can do for you and who you're at looking looking for and what you're excited about right now.

[John Borthwick]

Yeah, yeah. So Beta Works is roots, right? You still buy photo logs. So I sold photolog, started betaworks in late 2007, 2008 and we started out and most people know us as the sort of OG venture studio. So venture studio, I view it as kind of a suitcase word that people, different people put different things in the suitcase and so you can sort of interpret what it is. In our case, we were always thesis first, right? We always had a view of the world and our first five years we spent a lot of time building and investing around the social web. So we thesis first and we raised some money into the venture studio to go build companies and to invest. And so, you know, early things and wins we had at betaworks is that we had, we were very interested in social web. We wrote the first check into Tumblr. We did. There was a Twitter search engine that we worked with and then pivoted and then started sold Twitter, became Twitter search engine and then there was Twitterific and there was Tweetdeck and there was, we were very prolific and Twitterific around the Twitter ecosystem. And so we did a lot of things in the Twitter ecosystem and then as that ecosystem shut down, we sold a lot of those things to Twitter or we pivoted them or some of them failed. We built things like Bitly, which became sort of like, you know, sort of tools to use the software that we then moved to mobile and to do some fun things. We did Giphy, we did Dots the game. So we built a bunch of things. In 2016 we decided, we made two decisions. The first is that the venture studio model that we'd been running at that point there for about eight years, we felt like that the market, and specifically the New York tech market had become so active with founders that there were these sort of comparative edge that we had as being the place you would go to meet founders and builds things was changing and that we needed to, we needed to change. So we changed our approach and so we started, we took basically the vent, the best of the venture studio model and we sort of brought it together with the accelerator model, those sort of YC accelerator model. And we started off the matic accelerators. You know, fast forward to today, we've done about close to 15 of them. Them. The one which started two weeks ago is around AI interfaces. I mentioned agents before we did the first half of last year we did agents, then we did native AI apps. We've had a whole bunch of, you know, we started doing AI machine learning stuff in 2016. Our first camp, which Chris was involved with, I think, and he definitely came to speak at, was called Bar camp and where we were looking at conversational interfaces and Hugging Face was in that camp. And so. And then the second thing we also changed, which is kind of detail, is we we changed our capital structure. It took a few years, but we sort of had a holding company structure and then we moved into sort of a DPLP structure. So we sort of change the engines behind Beta Works. But if you come to Beta Works today, you know, we're down in me packing. You know, we had a fun event last night with some symbionts with some artificial life hanging out and chatting with them and we have a camping process now, so we do a ton of events here. We still use it as a space to convene founders and bring founders together and sort of a hub of activity around AI, machine learning, robotics and sort of, I would say, deepish tech.

[Interviewer Brian]

All I can say personally is that it's a great space and I enjoy it every time I'm down there. John, Beta Works all the great stuff from the history of the New York City tech scene. Thanks for coming on and remembering all that.

[John Borthwick]

For us it was a pleasure. Bundle and safe With Expedia, you were made to follow your favorite band and from the front left pro we were made to quietly save you. More Expedia made to travel Savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.