Open or closed? The answer is both, w/Joi Ito

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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Chicago in the 80s, it's uh in the middle of the AIDS crisis. house music was kind of just peeking out.

But it was a very vibrant period for nightclubs. I discovered that on the north side of Chicago, there was a really interesting vibrant club scene. That's Joey Ito. director of the MIT Media Lab, describing his former life. as a DJ in Chicago in the nineteen eighties.

Our club, it's in the basement. They used to put sawdust on the floor because it would get pretty grummy. That vibrant and grimy nightlife scene was very different from where Joey spent his daylight hours. I was studying physics at University of Chicago, which was I wouldn't call it a monoculture, but a lot of people with very similar values, very focused and intent on getting a good education, competing with each other. The contrast.

Couldn't have been starker. Despite its intellectual pretensions to openness, The university felt like a world closed off to new ideas. But the nightclubs.

felt like a constant, vibrant culture clash of people's styles, and values. An open house. Then anyone could enter. And they did. We had people like

Iggy Pop and Run DMC and Madonna, you had the City Alderman, the Drug Dealers, the Mafia. the goths, the bartenders, they're really a community. It was an unlikely Chaotic. Group of people.

There are always fights going on, you know, Iggy Pop would come and throw a bottle at one of our bartenders. It was the music that kept everyone in balance. The music at the time was everything from techno to industrial music to house music. The management see, you know those kids on the dance floor Get them over to the bar to have a drink and those college kids get'em onto the dance floor. And see the goth kids in the court, get them out of here. They're way too drunk. As a DJ, it usually fell on Joey to get the people to do what the manager wanted.

Want the hip hop kids off the dance floor? Play something by the cure. Want the house fiends to pick up the pace? Put on Farley Jackmaster Funk.

Want to ruin everyone's night? Joey was the puppet master, and his records were the strings he pulled. The DJ by playing the music could get people to drink, could get people to come in, could get people to leave, and then you'd get the last call for alcohol and the DJ was in charge of giving them all out of the room. And what I realized was that the music that you played was an essential component to the atmosphere of a club and also the culture of the club. Actually.

Puppet master is the wrong term. Joey was more like a conductor. and his unlikely rotation of music maintained the harmony between the very different groups of people who felt at home. In his club. There was a a loving community that was trying to protect the runaway kids, that were trying to make sure that the drug dealers didn't sell drugs to the people who had AIDS and

It contrasted starkly with the competitive Monoculture Of this community I was in in university. This nightclub. Was the opposite.

Of the kind of monoculture you see in a university. or any kind of members only club. A members only club is exclusive. It keeps other people out, and the privileged few who can get in are Know what to expect. That's the attraction.

But it's also the weakness. Those members will never be exposed to truly new ideas. And many scale companies seem like stayed. Members only clubs. Set in their ways.

And closed. To the world. They have a lot to learn from the wild diversity at Joey's Nightclub. I wouldn't recommend scaling that nightclub. That's a recipe for chaos.

But the vibrancy, the openness, the sharing of the dance floor. Every company needs to take these ideas to heart. I believe no organization that's entirely closed or Or entirely open can scale as successfully as an organization

that combines both. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. But well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it.

This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Founder of LinkedIn. Partner Greylock.

And your host. And I believe No organization that's entirely closed or Or entirely open can scale as successfully as an organization that combines both.

Many organizations have Businesses. Government agencies, universities. are essentially closed. Top down.

Hierarchical. Members only. Speak out of turn, and you'll be asked to leave. You have to be part of the in crowd. To contribute.

However, in organizations and communities that are open There is no In crowd. Anyone. can join and contribute.

Ideas are judged on their merit. Think of open competitions. Open source code. or even the proverbial town square. Openness.

Always invites. A bit of chaos. You run the risk of losing control. But it's a risk. Well worth taking.

Because openness also breeds innovation. New points of view can service from anywhere and bring novel solutions to problems. Knowing precisely which aspects of your organization should be open and which should be closed. And to what degree?

Will set you on a path. To rapid scale. I wanted to speak with Joey Edo about this. Because Joey has been instrumental in the growth of my own ideas about networks and And openness.

Joey's an entrepreneur. Investor en theorizer Who spent much of his career championing radically open systems? From creative commons To cyber currency.

Joey also railed against established Top down institutions from governments To banks. to universities. Six years ago.

Joey accepted a role inside one of these famously closed universities. As director of the famed MIT Media Lab, Joey's evolved from a staunch believer in radically open communities. to a nuanced advocate for bringing openness to previously closed. Organizations. Joy and I come at the idea of openness from different angles.

But both our approaches Aimed to drive innovation at scale. And involved. Many, many people. Along the way.

The way that I normally introduce Joey is College dropout. director of the MIT Media Lab. It's a quick way. to help people begin to understand him.

I dropped out of college. three times. Well, actually I dropped out of college twice at a doctorate PhD program once. It felt like there was more I could learn online than I could learn Joey dropped out to become immersed in that nightclub community. It was not the first radically open community that Joey had become involved in.

As a high school student, back in Tokyo, Joey had worked in his father's research labor. It gave him access to computers. And the early internet. At night I would program video games and also break copy protection on software on the Apple computer. Yes.

You heard him right. Joey's teenage years were spent breaking copyright On software. But the thing that really excited Joey about these new technologies was Where the communities

that were forming around them. Online bulletin boards. We're just emerging, and people from across the world engage in conversations they could never have in their everyday lives. With people in other countries of higher social status. These communities.

Cut through hierarchy. They flattened. the playing field. And it's fair to say that not everyone appreciated that. Joey.

Tested this new found access. in his Tokyo High School. Once I got into the university networks, I realized that You know, a lot of these professors who wrote the textbooks that we were using would answer email if you said, Oh I'm a high school kid in Japan and I just read your textbook and I have a question about this thing.

And my physics teacher hated it because I would come in and say, Well, but I talked to the author of the book and he says you're wrong. And so I got a C in physics. Mm. He may have barely scraped through his physics class, but Joey took a lot of lessons from those open online communities. After fully immersing himself in Chicago's club scene, Joey returned to Tokyo to open a nightclub of his own.

But technology. kept creeping back in. And you go to Tokyo, but then you start thinking, Okay, I should maybe think about the technology business. What led you to start thinking startups, venture capital. W what what led you into that direction? And I wanna just establish for the record that I am

Not even close to the level of strategic that you are. And so Geniusly stumble around. I went back to Japan, had a nightclub, was doing events, was interested in media, so I was working for N H K the Broadcasting Company and was just kinda running around. And I and I did computer networks But just out of curiosity.

Joey's curiosity and his open collaborative network of like minded tech pioneers meant he soon had skills that were in great demand. Particularly from big companies finding their way in the new frontier of the internet. Joey would need to speak the language of business. If he was going to work with these top down, prestige driven organizations. He set up a consulting practice.

Mm-hmm. I didn't know how to run a company, but I set it up anyway. And at the time I remember going to negotiate, you know. office lease and they said well, you know, what about the security deposit and how da da like I'm gonna have to talk to my lawyer and I was like, Mom, what is a security deposit?

Joey may not have understood the fine details of office leasing, but he and his hacker friends were landing contracts with big clients like IBM and Sun Microsystems. Their open community had accelerated their learning. And they're among the few people with the skills that the big institutions needed. Another company they worked with.

Was a fledgling internet listing site. Called Yahoo. Joe and his team. Offer to set up Yahoo's Japan service.

And we went over and I you know, people were like sleeping under the desks and and I got a deal. It was a a verbal commitment that I would get fifty percent of Yahoo Japan in exchange for setting it up, doing the servers. Joey told his friend, Softbank founder, Masayoshisan. About this verbal commitment with Yahoo. And I was telling him about Oh wow, there's this Yahoo thing is really cool. And

This is when I learned about sort of Massa's style. He was like he immediately flew to California and said to Yahoo, we're gonna invest in your company. And if you don't let us invest, we'll invest in a competitor. I don't know if there were any competitors and he came back Well you you're clearly not gonna get fifty percent of Japan we're gonna fund it, but we'll give you one percent.

Hearing Joey tell this story, you might believe Massa style consists of winning at any cost. But Masa may have also realized that Joey would have trouble making the Yahoo deal work on his own. Joey knew how to build a nightclub community, and he knew how to forge a loose alliance between brilliant hackers with big ideas. But he also needed his mom's advice on a security deposit. The fact that he was satisfied with a verbal agreement from Yahoo who

Underline this naivete. As did Joey's next move with Massa. And I looked at them and I said, You guys are a bunch of software distributors. You don't have any technical people. How are you gonna build this thing? Well, you guys can build it and I said, Okay, well, screw your one percent

I want I think I can remember what it was, like twenty thousand dollars. And he was like, Okay, fine. And so we we built the first Yahoo Japan beta server. Took us a long time to get paid, which was annoying. But then Yeah, who made a ton of money. That missed opportunity taught Joe at least two lessons about working within the established hierarchy of large closed organizations. I realized later I should have taken the one percent. But I also realized that without capital

And without the ability to execute at a corporate level. I'd just be that kid with the ideas. For Joey, it wasn't enough. to be that kid with the ideas. He wanted to take his ideas and shepherd them into becoming a reality. The best way to do that?

Learn the harness. corporate world that Joey and his hacker friends had scorned. So Joey set up a consulting business that would tap the freewheeling new ideas that were burgeoning on the internet. Ideas about engaging a wider audience, communicating freely, and making them accessible to all, and then present them in a way that closed business world.

could understand and run with. I would say that if it weren't for the fact that I was working with a guy who had been in in business for ten years, who knew how to operate a business, it probably would have taken me a lot longer before I actually had something that made money at scale.

Alongside his consulting practice. Joey both join and created some of the online communities that emerged in the 1990s. Many of Joey's early communities skewed heavily Towards complete Openness.

with anonymous users and a rule free ethos. Joey thrived in this kind of chaos. But even he Experience the downside. First of all, it started with a mailing list called Net Surf, where we would all share our links about

Interesting websites that we'd found. And at some point some slightly troll like people were hanging out in the mailing list and I said, You know You guys, this is like my living room. Yeah, get out of here. Don't behave like that. They said, This isn't your living room and I said, But it's on my service. I don't care. This is a public space. I can say what I want And I thought, uh that's kinda weird because I've created it, I'm writing it, but all right, fine, whatever, you know, I've lost control of this mailing list. So to escape the trolls.

Joey set up a channel on Internet Relay Chat or IRC. A network of servers that allowed users to chat in real time. It was still open. But he could kick out the trolls. I said, you know what, I'm gonna call the channel Joey Ito because then there will be no doubt

that I'm in charge. So we created a channel called Joe Ito and and it was just my friends. But while the troll problem had been solved. It was clear. Joey wasn't quite as much in control as he thought he would be. But I remember a time when somebody came into the

And so then I realized that, you know, even if you name the thing your name, it's still not your place. What Joey learned was a classic lesson of the limits of radical openness. Вні креть а венс систем. You foster open conversations.

But you also create a safe place for trolls. People who act in bad faith. To disrupt a system and drive others away from using it. It's a phenomena that almost every open platform grapples with today. From social media channels.

to Wikipedia. But the trolls on the Joey Edo chat room. didn't deter the real Joe Ido from his love of all things open. He saw the risk of opening up. People will express their own views.

you may lose control of the conversation. But he also saw huge benefits. Innovation. Inclusiveness. The wisdom of crowds.

and we'll hear how Joey leaned into the movement toward open platforms. Right after the break. When you build substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity.

When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years. Building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

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Before the break. We heard how Joey established himself as a go-to internet consultant in Tokyo in the 1990s. Building Yahoo Japan, among other websites. After a series of ups and downs familiar to all founders, Joey was in a position to make investments of his own. It was the early two thousands, and blogging had just emerged as a disruptive force in media and politics.

Joey saw in blogging the same radical open ethos he'd seen on the bulletin boards of the early internet. Blogging leveled the playing field between everyday people and the closed world of established media companies. There was an unfettered sharing of ideas that anyone could participate in. And it was around this time that our path first crossed. I was at PayPal at the time.

That was when you were saying I'm convinced that there's this entire new kind of web two revolution, the kind of revolution of communities, of networks, of social identity. I had thought a lot about social identities, but I hadn't thought about the open network side of these things. You were like Well, there's this really great company six apart. We should invest in this one together. And I was like, Sure, why not?

The key word for me and probably why you ended up building more successful companies than me was really community. So I was into chat rooms, into bulletin boards and and into social media, but from the perspective of a bunch of people having a conversation. Healthy communities. Lost your open conversations.

And I did think about community in this respect, but Joey is right. It wasn't a focus on openness. that helped me build scale with LinkedIn. Rather, it was my belief in the value of building networks. that are open in some respects.

but closed in others. LinkedIn was an open community. And that anyone could join. But it was also a collection of closed communities. We required real name signups, and we only allowed you to connect to people you know and who agree to the connection.

We held to the balance of open and closed that we believed would foster trust. In a business community. It's this trust that attracted more people to contribute and fueled scale. in any company or community. You have to strike this balance between open

And closed. Another organization that has famously struck this balance is TED. For years Ted was an expensive elite Invitation only conference. So when they first put their talks online for free.

under a creative commons license. It was a radically open move. June Cohen. One of the executive producers for Masters of Scale was previously the executive producer at TED. She led the charge to put TED Talks online, and June also launched

Ted's open translation project. Which allowed volunteers around the world to subtitle the talks. She has a story that perfectly encapsulates this balance between open and closed systems. I asked her to share it. When you talk about

Often picture them as a mosh pit, you know, where everyone chaotically does whatever they want. But the most effective open systems. Usually have a lot of hidden structure. So our translation program at TED was very open, but it wasn't a mosh pit. We put a lot of structure in place to support great work and also to prevent mischief.

The potential benefits were clear to June from the start. Still. It was a scary move. It's one thing to believe hypothetically in the power of crowdsourcing, but it is a totally different thing to put your speakers' words in the hands of people you don't know who speak languages you don't understand. So the day the translation program launched, we got a panic message from one of our Polish translators. He told us that the Polish subtitles on five talks had been mistransed. They were just gobbledygook. Well, it turns out that those five bad translations were actually done by a professional translation house we had hired.

To help us launch. It looks like they had just run them through an auto translator. They probably figured, oh, it it's Polish. They'll never know. As it turns out, the only truly bad translations we ever experienced came from professional translators. They were caught and corrected by our volunteers within thirty six hours of launch. Why? Бізвед промід. And that's the power of openness.

Ted's open translation project scaled to more than 20,000 volunteers working in 120 languages. It paved the way for Ted's international growth, including a T show in Japan. Hosted By none other. Then Joey Edo.

And to me. That story in which the scary sounding volunteers save Ted from the paid professional translators. Encapsulates so much about the way open and closed systems can join forces and play to each other's strengths. These ideas about openness were gaining momentum in the early two thousands.

Wikipedia Launched in two thousand one. Creative Commons is Issued its first license in two thousand two. And Joey was one of the earliest commentators on the movement.

In two thousand three, Joey put out his famous essay Emergent Democracy. It described how loose networks of individuals were using blogging and other online tools to affect change in society and politics from the ground up. It was really this idea that we would see an emergent ability to to cause action, to think as a community. It was kind of collective action um and collective intelligence. But back then it seemed very rosy. Like if we could just connect everybody and get everybody the opportunity to say everything they want, we'd have

direct democracy in the world become peaceful and everybody would realize that all people were good and then it came on. Joey saw the evidence all around him for the benefits of collective action and direct democracy. And he became a champion of all things open. He joined the boards of Creative Commons, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Open Source Initiative. As an investor, Joey placed bets on startups that championed

Bottom up initiatives. Kickstarter. Flicker. Twitter You can probably see why Joey's path and mine kept crossing.

We co-invested in a number of companies and we agreed in the opportunity of open platforms. But we had a fundamental disagreement. Because I believed The biggest opportunity lay with closed networks or Mostly closed networks.

Ones that required a real identity and connected you Only to people you know. Our views on open versus closed networks have evolved over the intervening years, as some of our expectations have been confirmed, some confounded and some exploded. As you'll hear from this exchange, it is a subject we can still talk about endlessly.

I think that your notion of having closed networks and trust as a key piece was prescient of the Issues that would come. I think the

Obvious truth is to create innovation. You want to have as much breadth of allowing the innovation, e.g. open networks as possible. But then the question is as a business creator and as a investor and as a capitalist, you want to actually capture as much of that value. So you want to tend to be more closed. We were just in constant conversation. And I think Mostly we kinda said look we'll both

Bet and invest on both sides and we'll see how it See how it plays out. Yes, and and we know how it Turn. Well the the the tightly uh bound networks uh had a

faster growth towards uh equity value. Although may be impossible. Without the open systems. I think the open protocol lowered the barrier to competition, first of all. And allowed a kind of scaling. Well, you wouldn't have been able to create those new companies

without having the platform be sufficiently open that they could all go create. So you know, anything from Google to Netflix to Facebook wouldn't be created unless the internet was open. That's and so you need that baseline open system to create all that value, which is the value of the open systems. One of the reasons we still talk about this is because the dynamic between open and closed systems is constantly shifting. Open systems are great for idea generation. And evolution.

But if you're going to scale rapidly. Any of these ideas, a closed system. Or at least tight rules. Often works best. And the organizations that stand to gain the most by embracing some openness are

are those that are traditionally and staunchly closed. Corporations. Universities. Government agencies. So what happens if you're working in one of these closed systems?

How can your company Harness the power of radical openness. Without descending into a disorganized Free for all. An expert in this area is Megan Smith.

Mean was chief technology officer for the White House under President Obama. She has a number of tactics that harness the power of radical openness. And she's put them to great effect in some of the most complex organizations on the planet. One innovation close to our heart is the solution summit. She helped plan for the United Nations.

The summit aims to unearth solutions for the UN's sustainable development goals. And so we said. What if we just put up a webpage and say World? What do you already have that solves these goals that's either working now or promising? And so we posted that on the UN site and then we blast an email pointing at it through lots of ministries of science and technology and through all the fellows, like Ashoka fellow, Ted Fellow, all our colleagues, and out went the word.

And in came eight hundred submissions from a hundred countries in two weeks. The results that came from opening up this traditionally closed system Were astounding. And we saw extraordinary things, a team flying drones to plant a billion trees a year. A team teaching law in prison in Uganda because thousands of people had gone to jail with no representation. Now lots of people, in fact thousands of getting themselves out of jail. There's a guy named Bed O Juarez building a floating fab lab in the Amazon.

We have four hundred indigenous tribes that come indigenous people who are there. with their incredible capabilities around bio. information and and indigenous knowledge that could merge together with you know modern machine tools and and capabilities. And the only rules were we want breath. of ideas and we want breath of humans because the world is full of lots of talent. And so we got that.

It was Megan Smith who invited Joey to apply for the position he now holds The director of the MIT Media Lab. The Media Lab Was founded in 1985 by Nicolas Negraponti, and for decades, the lab has been a hub of cross-disciplinary innovation. The Media Lab also has an unusually close relationship with the corporate and startup worlds, which means that MIT born innovations frequently make their way into the hands of consumers.

Technologically, it was right up Joey's alley. I didn't know anything about the media lab and I really had no intention of ever of being in an academic institution. But I came here to do an interview and we spent two days

just meeting students and faculty and staff. And it turned out to be still probably the most interesting two day series of conversations I ever had. And I said if I can hang out with these people Every day. I'll do anything to do that. This is

Was the kind of institution Joey could fully embrace. A place that described its work as anti disciplinary. was always going to appeal to Joey. It was almost like coming home.

Just like the clubbers in Chicago, or the voices from far-flung corners of the globe in those early days of internet bulletin boards, the Media Lab. Was a community of open voices. Freely sharing ideas. How much did you see in that?

That it reminded you of the DJ dance floor. That's really an interesting question. Actually the reason I dropped out of college to go to the dance floor was Because I love the community.

And this is a community I wanna be in. This is the lost tribe that I've been looking for. And if it means doing operational stuff that I never really thought was my forte, um fine. The media lab melded the powers of the closed institution with the powers of an open network. But Joey wanted to make the media lab even more open. He wanted to crack a door and bring the world in. I realized coming from the internet that there are people doing cool stuff all over the place.

Ted was publishing their videos all over the place. And so it was very counterintuitive to me to have something be closed. So it felt like a computer that wasn't connected to the internet. Joey set out. to connect the metaphorical computer of the Media Lab to the internet. He knew that any closed organization would run the risk of stagnation.

So Joey started stirring things up at the Media Lab with a series of open programs, including open competition, open classes, and an advisory council and director's fellows program that brings outside voices Regularly. Into the lab. Instead of just being a closed community, trying to make it an open community was one of my areas of focus. A lot of that also is about a culture change in the lab.

But I think, you know, the students already had that intuition, right? And I think they were already kind of breaking the rules and posting stuff onto YouTube. So a lot of it was just unlocking stuff that just wanted to happen. Joey was taking his philosophy of radical openness and supercharging what he could do by harnessing the power. of a top down institution. The irony. Isn't lost on him.

You said to me, I remember this conversation, we said You know my career is my career is breaking monopolies. Right, like is is kind of going up against the monopolies because the telcos actually didn't want an internet. They wanted a we control everything and you pay us for it, versus Permissionless innovation. We were fighting against some pretty awful institutions like the telcos who were to me trying to prevent this dream of open access to everyone at low cost.

This tension between the radically open and the radically closed does not need to be a zero sum game. And we were beating up mainstream media like they were the the evil empire. But then we realize wait, we're kill we're they're gonna about to die. So the reason I'm on the New York Times board is kinda like you're jumping in to do CPR. I didn't mean to really hurt you that bad, you know, we were just punching you. But now in retrospect this kind of institution bashing that we were doing, now I'm on the institution side realizing that we need institutions, and so there's this kind of interesting healthy balance. So I feel I'm spending almost as much time trying to protect our important institutions, while at the same time, I guess we often call this a radical flank, but using the somewhat radical disruptive people to make sure that the people in the institutions are thinking about innovation and about the future, but not sitting on the laurels.

Getting The open closed balance right is the key challenge, and it is different for each specific situation. How do we tweak the level of openness in any organization to ensure the greatest impact? Here's Joey's view. From his seat at the media lab.

It's a very complex system with all these parts interrelated, but I think the key point is that you need to be in conversation across engineers and social scientists, across Silicon Valley businesses and the regulators. You actually in fact have to work together not only to think about and understand the problems, but to forcefully come out with things like open letters with going to companies and questioning their work and actually building examples of things that work properly. This is what I learned from Arab Spring, you know, Hey, yay, finally emergent democracy is here. Oh no, uh a lot of people are suffering. And so this time around, we have to be a bit more intentional. In trying to get the arc. to bend towards justice rather than just sort of leave it up to the market and a whole bunch of hackers.

Only by continuing to have these open conversations can we keep pace with the shifting challenges we face. And our companies, our institutions. And our societies. It is a conversation we all need to be radically open to having. And no one.

should be closed off from. I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. The show is recorded on site in California and produced at the studio inside SY Partners in New York.

Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our producers are Chris McCloud, Adam Skuse. Jenny Cataldo Dan Ket Me. Jordan McCloud and Ben Manilla.

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