Tech media queen Kara Swisher on the secret to a great interview
If you’re someone who works in tech or media, then Kara Swisher needs no introduction. She got her start in Washington, DC writing for outlets like Washington City Paper and The Washington Post, then later took a job covering technology for The Wall Street Journal. While there, she and the legendary columnist Walt Mossberg launched AllThingsD, a conference that attracted Silicon Valley’s brightest and most successful tech luminaries.
In 2013, Kara and Walt left WSJ to launch Recode, a tech news site that now operates under the banner of Vox Media. Recently, we at KindredCast sat down with Kara to ask about how she prepares for interviews, why she decided to sell Recode to Vox, and how she lost over $52,000 in Bitcoin. Kara chatted with Magnet Companies co-founder and LionTree Executive-in-Residence alum Betsy Morgan.
Here’s what we learned:
Kara’s advice for conducting an interview: don’t prepare too much
There’s no such thing as a bad interview subject, only a bad interviewer. “Every person is interesting,” said Kara. “Every person has a story. It’s up to the interviewer … to get that out of him … It’s always my fault if the interview’s not good. It’s always because I lacked the curiosity or the ability to ask the right questions or have a conversation.”
One thing that’s sure to ruin an interview? Overpreparation. “I don’t prepare for interviews at all,” said Kara. “I think you miss things if you have a list of questions you want to ask.”
Why she writes for The New York Times even though she edits her own tech website
In 2018, Kara became a regular columnist for The New York Times. Why didn’t she just publish these columns to Recode? “While I was getting purchase out of Recode itself — people in the industry were reading it — I wanted a larger audience to talk about these issues that I was concerned about … The New York Times has a global, broad audience, and so I thought I would bring tech to the masses and then the masses to tech.”
Tech is no longer an isolated industry; it’s interwoven into every part of our lives. “It’s sort of like covering the Industrial Revolution … I find it really important to cast a broader net than just, ‘Wow, Apple came out with this gadget last week.’”
How she accidentally ended up losing $52,000 in Bitcoin
During Bitcoin’s early days, Kara was working on a story about the cryptocurrency. “Someone I covered … said, ‘You should buy some, Kara.’ I go, ‘I’m not really going to buy this stuff, but I think I’ll write about it or talk about it.’” Ultimately, as part of her research, she did end up buying 10 bitcoins, but at some point she lost track of where they were stored. “I might’ve thrown it [out]. I’m sure I threw it out. I don’t keep those stupid things because I think they’re dangerous. I don’t know.”
The current price for 10 bitcoins? $52,151.
Why she decided to sell Recode to Vox Media
In 2015, not long after Kara and Walt launched Recode with venture capital backing, they sold the publication to Vox Media. Some within the industry wondered why they’d sold it after spending only $1 million of the $12 million raised. “The thing is, the economics are tough, no matter how you slice it,” she said. “We had just been funded and we had a lot of money. We had all the money left, essentially, and I was like, ‘This is not gonna turn out right. I’m too little. I’m just too little.’”
While covering the industry, Kara noticed that smaller media companies were having trouble reaching the scale necessary to achieve profitability, and to survive they needed to be acquired by larger media companies. Flash forward several years, and you now have Disney acquiring Fox for $71 billion and AT&T acquiring Warner Media for $85.4 billion. “[I] could see it coming, and so [I] wanted to be part of a bigger organization.”
To listen to our interview with Kara, check out Episode 40 of KindredCast, embedded below or available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
