Kevin Kelly

We lost control, and that's why we had to sell, and that's when we all left.

Okay, we left, not because it wasn't fun anymore, but because we lost control over it.

We weren't having to report to anybody.

We were just trying to make the magazine that we wanted to read, and it was totally fun because...

We could say anything.

That was one of the ways I would say is you have to retain control, ownership of it.

And this goes back to what I was talking about articulating.

For me, that was something that we were very slow to see at WIRE, but I did learn that.

There's a bit of advice in my book about what we learned from the advertising people, which is you get your message across, you have to simplify, simplify, simplify, and then exaggerate.

There was a sense of like us exaggerating.

coming to understand what it was that we're doing in our role and being able to, again, articulate that to the people.

So this idea of the optimistic view was not something that was so evident at the very beginning, but it became evident that that was our role, that that was what we were doing in part, that that was sort of what we were about.

And that helped tremendously in terms of

deciding whether this is a wired story or not.

There's tons and tons of directions to go.

And so being able to brand it in that sense was us being partly enabled by articulating it ourselves and being able to do that.

Do you think that's right?

I think that's right.

Again, that came from my time at Wired.

We'd have story meetings every month and we were trying to make assignments to story ideas that we had.