Will W be Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley’s social media dominance?

0:00Mike Butcher:Welcome to Path Founders, where we cover the entrepreneurs behind the code, the capital behind the startups and the consequences. With social media fast becoming the main way we connect with each other and consume the news, some of those living outside the US, where the biggest social media platforms are based, have started to wonder if that's really such a healthy situation to be in. When it's become clear that platforms like X, for instance, have been known to propagate highly divisive content, could there be a better way? W is a new European social media platform built around a simple but radical premise.

0:43Mike Butcher:No anonymity, no foreign ownership and full alignment with what they describe as European values on privacy, identity and data control. It's led by Anna Zaita, formerly Chief Privacy Officer and VP for Data and AI at eBay, and it arrives at a moment when trust in platforms like X and others is fracturing. and Europe is openly questioning its dependence on US tech infrastructure. The question is, is this a credible new social network, which geeks and the general public will flock to over Instagram, X and TikTok, or simply a more political project in search of users? Anna, thanks so much for joining PathFounders.

1:28Mike, big questions. Thank you. So I'm happy to answer. So we started W a couple of months ago and probably, as you know, So we pre-launched the Enter project in Davos in January because we feel there might be room for an alternative, especially for a social media platform with verified humans as users. Because this is what we're seeing on most of the other social media platforms right now. You don't really know who is a human, who is a bot, and this has multiple implications. So we thought it's good to offer an alternative, especially with users that have been verified as humans. So this is our approach.

2:10And the app is up and running. And we are letting in people now step by step. And over the next couple of weeks and month, we will let in everyone from the wait list. So it's a very exciting time. And we feel we have a momentum. At least this is what I have been feeling. And all of us on the team after Davos, we received, I would say, thousands of messages from users or future users who said, build it now. We need you now. And this is a good alternative. Of course, there are always haters, especially when you expose yourself. and I don't want to say that this is a political project so I don't have a political agenda with that just one thing free speech and protect democracy because I feel when we protect democracy we protect the truth and but besides that everyone is welcome to join the platform from the left to the right I'm politically in the center so but that's what we stand for but I'm happy to explain

3:13Mike Butcher:more okay um right well i mean is that the question is though is is uh is this going to be a product company or is it more geopolitical i mean and also let's just let's also address the fact that you're not going to allow anonymity now that's isn't that a bit of a fundamental break from the internet um you know how will for instance uh people who are under the under the boot of dictator shot dictatorships around the world? How will they be able to join? How are you going to protect them? Yes, Mike, that's a very, very good question. And we discussed that over the last couple of weeks internally.

3:52And we decided that we want to allow anonymous accounts. So this is exactly new. Yes, I don't knew we decided that already a couple of weeks ago. But there's an important distinguish or distinction people need to verify when they want to interact with a platform. So So, okay, I take a step back. Whoever wants to read on the platform can read and can consume news. But whoever wants to share information needs to verify as a human. But we have developed a technology together with a service provider that allows us to verify humans in a very privacy-preserving way. So another company is verifying that, Mike, you're a human, that we only receive the information that you are user123456 and you are a human.

4:44And then you can decide on our platform, do you want to post and share your contact under Mike Butcher or under, I don't know, Donald Duck123. And we don't have access to this information. So we only have this token, which is hashed and encrypted, and we cannot trace it back because the data at the other end has already been deleted. So, of course, we will incentivize that people will share their opinions and their news under real name, because we also feel that with a clear name and under real name, conversations are always more civilized and nicer than hiding behind anonymity. And this is why if you might decide that you want to post under an anonymous account or under Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, whatever you choose, or Mike123, we will ask you to add additional contextual information like age range and probably nationality.

5:49So to give users a bit of more context like this person is in the age between x and y and has british nationality for example so

6:01Mike Butcher:that you can put things into perspective yes and in fact actually and we saw that on x a few weeks ago that they attempted to reveal where some accounts were from and it turned out some accounts that for instance were yes hugely pro donald trump and hugely maga oriented were actually being operated from India, for instance, and then quickly deleted that feature. But obviously, so that sounds like it's relatively new information. I haven't heard about your platform yet. Yes, correct. We decided that after Davos because we also reached out to our future user community with a CEO newsletter and we added some polling.

6:44And this is where we asked the future users, like, do you want to allow anonymous accounts? Yes or no? and something in the middle where we say we allow anonymous accounts, but we incentivize clear names, but we give some additional information, context information. And then the response was very clear that many people, I mean, we have people on the wait list from 180 different countries. And among them, countries like, I mean, or regions like Tibet, Venezuela, Cuba, I mean, US, many users or future users signed up from the US, from Canada, Singapore, Australia, Africa, Middle East. So and also from countries where exactly as I said, there is no free speech or people are scared and frightened.

7:29They're afraid to share their political opinions under their real name. And this is why we came up with this compromise approach that we allow anonymous accounts, but we incentivize or we want to incentivize in the future that people share their news under their renaissance.

7:44Mike Butcher:And can you reveal for us which company will be doing the human verification? Yes, it's Trust Anchor Group from Sweden. Right. That's another interesting aspect of this is that you only appear to have European investors. It's a Swedish company, I believe. How do you plan to kind of scale and maybe bring in other investment? Will you be only allowing European investors? So yes and no. So we have we started with only Swedish investments but now we have investors from Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium, Finland. So it's growing, there's a huge interest. We will allow investments from outside Europe but without voting rights.

8:33Mike Butcher:I see. Right. So you're obviously trying to kind of leaven the bread, as it were, in the investment side of things. Let's talk a little bit about the product itself, because, you know, in order to lure people over, your product's surely going to have to be at least as good as some of the other offerings out there. And what kinds of, you know, what's the product feature? What does it look like? What's the UX? Is it really going to be a bit like the twitter of old or is it what is it or blue sky and it's and i know that it's running under the blue sky protocol isn't it yeah yeah it's running on the at protocol so right now it it's very similar the functionalities are very similar to blue sky but over time we will add more features for example live features other features i mean the main feature right now is that when you interact with people on W, you know that they have been verified as humans.

9:31So this is the key feature, but then we will add other features in the future. But right now, we are, I mean, as you said, on the AT protocol, we can already connect with our friends from Blue Sky and Euro Sky, and it works seamlessly. But of course, over time, we want to make it a bit more interesting, and of course, we want to attract users on our side. But we are friendly with the other communities or confederations on the AT protocol, because at the end we share the same vision, the same goal, and we want to make the AT protocol community grow.

10:02Mike Butcher:I see. So will you be able to post on W and have it seen on Blue Sky? Yeah, it's already working and vice versa. We can also chat with Blue Sky people, with Euro Sky people. So it's working pretty well. Of course, the look and feel is a bit different on our side. And at one point, we will also add different trending items, a bit more media from the European side. So we're currently talking to all major European media houses to bring more European media on board, because as we all know, Blue Sky is, of course, grown in the US. It's very US-centric and we want to, you know, bring a bit of an alternative from Europe.

10:43Mike Butcher:I mean, do you feel that you'll end up with a startup in this traditional sense here with an exit or whatever? Or do you do you feel like it's more like a kind of a long term, like almost like a foundation? Yeah. So, I mean, it's not a foundation. It's like a for for profit business. We all want to make money with that. But we think long term and not short term. and it's not our goal to have a quick exit it's our goal to you know believe in the mission and make the AT protocol grow and give users actually an option or alternative which is out of Europe and with maybe a bit more fun functionality.

11:26Mike Butcher:And I noticed that your investors or we don't have time is the largest disclosed shareholder can you tell us a bit more about them? Yes we don't have time They have the largest shares or number of shares. This is a social media platform in the climate space based in Stockholm as well. And the connection is that we don't have time realized over the last couple of years and especially months that it has become more and more difficult to communicate about climate, the climate crisis, environmental issues, because there's so much fake news out there. and with all bots attacking especially the climate space this is where the you know initial idea came from but then the idea was to make w broader than just climate of course we are being deeply rooted in the sustainability and climate space but my job is and i'm convinced we can only make it successful if we open it up to society so like to all you know other layers and interests of society and this is why we have on purpose people on the advisory board from different political you know angles like more from the left side social democrats more from the conservative side green not so green so and this is actually my job to make it not only open it up to the entire society make it europe-wide but also go beyond that i'm just back from a trip to dc and new york where I was attending the Global Privacy Conference.

12:57You know, especially with this human verification, it's very important for us to explain to the privacy community that we have a privacy-preserving technology. We have a lot of privacy experts in the advisory board. And it was also interesting for me to go to the US and understand that many people in the US are saying, oh, we would love to explore an alternative in the social media space. And interestingly, sorry, to add on that, there was a bit of criticism over the last couple of weeks and months, like, oh, W, you want to create a government ID database, and this is totally overboard or totally crazy to collect government ID.

13:39So first, we don't collect the data, we just verify and then we delete the data ASAP. And then second, the CEO of Reddit just announced last week, probably you know, that they're also thinking of human verification because they have a growing AI bot problem as well. So maybe we are leading the industry here.

13:59Mike Butcher:Yeah, and I think probably it's fair to say that most of us are pretty tired of a lot of AI stuff. rough um but i mean getting down to it ultimately you're going to have to have some kind of business model so could you expand a bit more on that whether it be ads subscriptions and if it is advertising then you will have to collect data of some sort yeah so it's advertising and micro payments but advertising not in the hyper personalized way advertising more in the context based situation and i don't want to collect any sensitive or hyper personalized information and this is what I learned in my career so far.

14:38The more information you have, the more you're prone to have a data breach. I'm not interested in that. And we are thinking long-term, not short-term. Of course, then it will probably be a compromise for the short-term revenue, but we think long-term. So it will be advertising, but in a responsible way. And the second revenue stream will be micropayments. We all know the situation. We see an interesting article. We click on it, but we don't want to sign up for the fifth annual subscription. And this is why we are currently talking to European media houses and also to international media players, if they can provide us with exclusive content so that we can put behind the paywall for individual articles.

15:21Users can upload, I don't know, 20 euros, for example, or 20 pounds on their wallet. And then they can buy individual articles for half a pound or for a pound. So that's the second revenue stream.

15:34Mike Butcher:Okay, that'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Micro payments for content haven't traditionally been super successful. But I guess we'll have to see if that works. Yeah, yeah. So I feel everyone says the same, but everyone says at the same time, oh, it would be great to have it. So this is why we think maybe it's the time for it. And also I know, I mean, starting this new social media company is not easy. so many tried over the last couple of years some more and some less successfully but we think there's a good timing right now so especially with the overwhelming number of ai boards and people want to have more human connection again and more human interaction more life elements so we think there's momentum we try it and we think and we hope it will be successful okay well let's see how it plays out but another aspect of this is that you you said for instance you'll have the ability to go live video and stuff like that the um you know social media not yet we're working maybe that's so yeah sure in the future uh or other kinds of video we've seen a huge controversy about uh what happened with x and its ability to create nudes and and And there's actually, let's be honest, there's also a lot of pornography on X, actually.

16:52Mike Butcher:Yeah, yeah. I mean, is there a kind of a sort of a fine line between you being seen as sort of a compliant or safe platform rather than one that's, you know, maybe meaningful that might carry controversial content? Yes, I want to have controversial content. I mean, of course, there are things that we will not allow on the platform. This is pornography. and if this is like harsh harassment, like within the legal boundaries. But I am personally pro-free speech. So I have a PhD in free speech. And this is, I think, core of democracy that people can share their opinions. And hopefully it will be a bit like controversial because that adds the spark.

17:38But I want to try my best that this is being in a civilized way. and we try our best to do that. Of course, we will moderate content. We have to. We will do that with humans and with AI at the same time. And it will not be easy, but we try our best. So my approach is like free speech within the legal boundaries. But I think it will be good to have a lot of controversies on the platform because that's what people want to hear. And I think this is also what's important right now for society, that the extremes are talking to each other because I think what's not good for democracy and society overall, that the extremes are not talking to each other anymore.

18:20So, and I think the idea is to bring people together, talk to each other, hopefully in a bit of a, you know, opposite way, but to bring people together and share their views openly and in a civilized way.

18:32Mike Butcher:Sure. I mean, we've seen the tendency of social platforms to amp up the algorithm to more rage bait because it's an advertising business model. it garners attention doesn't it um is there not a sort of a con conflict between you needing to have revenues and also have engagement yeah yes and no so i wouldn't say it's a conflict it's a compromise at one point and one part of the business model is also that we will give more revenue back to the media houses to the media houses we are partnering with so the revenue that we create with the advertising which is for example attached to a certain media article we will share more revenue back with them than the usual other social media platforms.

19:16So this is hopefully an incentive for them to join us. And we will have a trusted media score or trust-based media score, which means we can see if the user is reading a full article or if an article is just a clickbait. So if a user is reading a full article, that means this is high-quality content. We will even share more revenue back with the media houses. like this, we want to incentivize more high quality content. And maybe I can already share that we will partner. This is pretty fresh with one of the biggest global investigative journalism associations, the ones who are behind the Panama Papers.

19:57And I think that's a good start to have, you know, interesting content on the side and support high quality journalism.

20:05Mike Butcher:Well, I think that was The Guardian that was part of the Panama Papers, correct? I'm not sure about that, but we are partnering with the Association of Investigative Journalism behind it. Okay, well this is actually more, this is kind of like new information. And it sounds a little bit like W is going to be a sort of Trojan horse for a lot of media outlets. Would you say that's the correct characterization? I don't want to say Trojan horse, it will be very transparent. I mean, you will see hopefully soon media outlets from different media houses in Europe, from different political sites. And that's also important for us to partner with multiple media houses and have partnerships with them from different European countries, from different political spectra, so that we cover the entire variety of opinions.

20:59But not only for Europe, but also beyond. Of course, you know, Europe is our core market. But what I realized in the U.S. this week, there's a huge appetite also outside the U.S. to outside of Europe, sorry, to join W. And we're currently meeting also with institutions like European Commission. I met with UN. I met with the World Bank also to see a little bit their appetite if they would be interested to join as well.

21:26Mike Butcher:okay well i mean assuming everything goes well what does success look like in a couple of years will it be users influence revenues how are you benchmarking that yeah so my dream is um so we are not aiming for doom scrolling and for maximum attention times what my dream is that hopefully one two or three years people wake up not only in europe rest of the world and check in the morning hey, what happened overnight? And check W as the main news source. And they can click maybe what happened around the world, what happened in Europe, what happened in my country, what happened in China and the US, and then connect with their friends because we also have a messenger attached to that.

22:12And then also share their opinions and maybe dial in in the evening again. So it's not about getting maximum attention and being super sticky. we want to be fun interesting meaningful and we rather aim for maybe shorter attention spans but really meaningful interaction than doom scrolling all day long right i see so that's such an

22:36Mike Butcher:interesting way of taking it and and it sounds to me like this is going to be a much bigger media project with emphasis on media than necessarily social um but this is both i think Yeah, it's a very interesting combination. Well, I look forward to you opening up. Give us a quick breakdown of what's the timeline, when will it fully launch, when will we all be able to kick the tires on it? Yeah, so Mike, I hope you're already on the wait list. So we are already letting people in from the wait list. So team first and then family, friends, and now advisory board members, shareholders. And then we slowly but surely let people in from the wait list.

23:17and in a couple of weeks we will probably have a bigger launch event to launch everyone, to let in everyone from the wait list. But first we want to test internally if everything is going well, also with content moderation and the legal boundaries and governance, everything in place. But soon you will hear more and we're already testing. It's working well and it's actually fun to see the product live. I'm very excited.

23:41Mike Butcher:Well, we're very interested in what happens next and we'll be covering the launch on PathFounders. But for now, Anna Zaita, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.