on an innishive at looking at the banner of income and inequality and there folks working humboldt county, eureka, california, all connected because they have the ability to connect to people, they're on the ground, in physical communities face to face. so i think that's something that could be very different the con funs of online and offline activity. >> i think we're not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we're going from a carriage from a prius. we're no longer using the -- the hash tag black lives matter, that hash tag has to do with black lives matter in terms of access to affordable housing and higher education. i think those issues while maybe they aren't coming out with how

we're speaking on the social media level about it, underlying all of that movement are the issues that you brought up that are important. income inequality is a huge problem in this country. i don't think anyone in this room would argue with that. but the way this generation is choosing to move behind it is in a different vehicle than perhaps generations before us. >> yeah, maybe in the front. [ inaudible ] >> i'm intrigued the facts you gave around the millenials core issues and for policy global warming, climate change and nationally around income inequality, and given that dem graphically, millenials will be

the dominant generation over the next ten years, what are the panel's views on the political landscape and the future political landscape of the u.s. and the impact on policy particularly related to those two issues? >> i think money and politics really shakes my view of the political landscape. the confluence and emergence of super pacs, it does affect who's running for office. we'll see the same folks time after time, with the top-down hierarchy. so money in politics is critical to equaling the playing field for the future political landscape. it's something i care deeply about. and a lot of people in our generation are like, these are the people we've been seeing

since i was in high school. if we get to the root of money in politics, we'll see a landscape that our generation will be happy with. >> and really to the work they're doing at the roosevelt network, seeding the fields. we can't expect to see very different people in positions of influence, if we're not ensuring that there's other folks rising up to have equally powerful networks. and that's something they're doing with younger people every day, by huge numbers. that's encouraging to know that thinking about in ten years, how many people have come through their work and other people's work, that we will see in positions of greater influence. >> i would just add, you know, there's a huge movement right now for people who want to elect elizabeth warren. that's not me as a liberal in new york talking.

there's a lot of people who have bought into her indictment of her political system, so much so that hillary clinton, for progressives, it's actually not as interesting as a candidate as elizabeth warren, her sort of rise to fame, she talks about income inequality every day, and young people are buying it, and they're listening. so i think that's been interesting. i think the other piece of it, climate change, i don't think we've cracked yet as a country and certainly amongst political leaders, it's not something that's being talked about day in and day out. i think it should be. but we haven't seen the mass mobilization yet, and i think that will change in the same way on lgbt rights. but income inequality there are politicians talking about and gaining big traction. so i think what you'll see is more people like that, it doesn't have to be somebody on the left. there's plenty of people who are

libertarians and on the right who talk about that issue also will gain more traction. >> i think that campaign finance reform is a huge issue. joel brought it up. in just talking about this generation and what we can do, maybe we'll not be able to elect or run for office with a lot of money, but we can change how those running for office run. so one huge thing, and i'm from texas originally, that really, like, hits home, and gerrymandering and redistricting reform. and the fact that people can redistrict their areas so that they continue to win and remain in office. so as a millennial, as any generation quite frankly, we should be hitting hard on these politicians that find that redistricting reform isn't important. i think it's insanely important. i think campaign finance reform and important. that's the way we'll get people in office and higher voter turn-out, right?

stopping people from creating voter i.d. laws that keep people from going to the polls. maybe we can't raise as much money as everyone else but we can share as hell -- can i say hell? i think those are three issues that we need to push harder, put major issues on those people regardless of how much money they have. >> the generation is the most diverse and just to both of those questions, you know, this was a survey of mike readers, so it's two important issue as a whole, but there's lots of other ones that really matter. and there's millenials on the coast and in the middle of the country. so i don't pretend to know all of the issues that young people are going to vote on. should we maybe to -- maybe over

here. yeah? >> first of all, thanks so much for being on the panel. second of all, i thought it was time for some female voices. third, i wanted to transcend the united states. so, given these new tools, how interconnected we are, and given this energy and discontent that we're seeing among young people around the world, whether turkey or mexico or india, how do we harness that industry to create, whether it's alliances or shared understanding for some of these issues that matter for the entire world? or, given that all of us will be leaders at some point, it would be better to have more countries as our friends than our enemies. how do we harness that energy right now? >> i can speak to that based on our work. so we work in six countries. the u.s. is one of them. and then three in east africa and two in southern africa.

our fellows are from 22 countries right now. been talking more about american ones just because of the audience. but we received more applications this year from uganda than anywhere else. and why it's interesting is that 60% of the people living in uganda are 35 and under. and the unemployment rate within that group of people is 60%. so it's a very large population of the country that doesn't have a job market. so we've worked a lot with our fellows there who are doing the same thing as our other fellows, working every day on solving health issues. because it's more of a society of elders using a narrow framework to figure out how they can use their voice to effect change and do it in a positive way. their president is, i want to say, 85 years old. so they feel -- all of our fellows feel a huge

disconnection between themselves and the issues that people in power care about. and yet they haven't had a lot of opportunities to explore how to use their voice and explore advocacy. where i see a huge area for potential impact, we have fellows in uganda, connected to other fellas, and they're building advocacy campaigns where now they have a lot of voices behind them. and there's a safety in having a lot of voices together. so that's one thing that's cool. and in addition, our world is so global that we could look up and see what's going on in uganda right now on the internet if we wanted to. so it's much easier to understand issues in other parts of the world. so for us to do our training at the beginning of the years with our fellows before they start their year, and we do it at newhaven at yale, and two years ago, a nigerian fellow stood up

and said, it's going to be so much easier when i'm the minister of health in uganda. and it was a really cute moment and it's cuter now, because she's getting her ph.d. at harvard, paid for by the ministry of health in nigeria with the stippingz stipulation that she returns to nigeria and helps them. there's a difference between knowing how to speak and speaking to power. and figuring out, what skills you need to be effective, rather than just speaking. >> i just also want to do a time check. how we doing? one or two more. okay, you've been waiting. >> thank you. thank you. i actually represent a previous

millennium, but i do have a daughter that is a millennial. and i very much appreciate your involvement in the global scene. but i do feel also that the united states is responsible for maybe over 20% of gdp in the world. and i feel that it's very important that we use the infrastructure that we have to the ability that we can possibly use it. and the question that my daughter had, is, what should we be doing about student debt and the cost of higher education in this country? because it looks very prohibitive for many people. >> anyone want to take it? take on student debt. >> i think if you look at things that are happening at a state level, trying to make college more affordable. the president just announced that community colleges were going to be free, was that what was it? there's some big things. i think your daughter has a

point. for me, i can't even and i think joel and i were talking about this the other day, we can't even fathom how our parents put us through college and the fact that there are people walk around every day having to put themselves through college and work, and this is a hurdle that affects low-income, minority groups the most. i think it's raising our voices about that legislation and holding people like the president to his promise. you know? >> we work on college campuses, so i care a lot about access to higher education. i think something that was interesting, one of our students at san bernardino community college, which say community college out in california, very articulately said that part of how we're going to be able to solve the higher education crisis is by involving more young people at the table. two students in d.c. went to a

department of education meeting. i think that's part of the first step. a lot of times we're analyzing things, looking at reports, people in d.c. are having panels. but what really matters, if you have the people who are looking to jobs and trying to go to college, or non-traditional students who have families and trying to put themselves through college, to chase this idea of opportunity that we have in this country, those are the types of people that we need in the policy process to make policies that are good for population. >> i'm wondering what the panel thinks of the notion that a socially liberal, fiscally conservative kind of candidate might be able to mobilize young voters. >> i think -- socially liberal, fiscally conservative, i think

that's very, very possible. i think people often ask me as the editor, wouare you biased? i say we're biased toward young people. lgbt rights, feminism, race, these are issues that if you ask people in our generation, everybody universally agrees, but there's others that are really hot debates. fiscal policy, as you mentioned, is one of them. foreign policy is another. so i think what will be interesting to see, in this election, i don't know who that candidate is going to be, but interesting to see, sort of, over the next election cycle, if you ask most young people, are you liberal or conservative, they say we're neither, we're independent. which means that there's a real opportunity for somebody to sort of carve out that niche and a

really opportunity for the gop to appeal to this demo if they can strike the right balance, if that makes sense. one interesting person to watch will be rand paul, particularly in 2016, you know, it's clear that on certain issues there's things that young people agree with and maybe on others, maybe not so much. and how people weigh those different factors will be interesting to watch, i think. >> i think one thing about just your question, i think the term socially liberal, fiscally conservative is insanely loaded. because i think when we look at candidates like hillary clinton versus warren, people want to label hillary clinton as being fiscally conservative. and i don't really think that's fair. i don't necessarily think that elizabeth warren is insanely, liberally on that point.

so i have a problem with labelling people as that. but when you look at it from a bigger term, and you look at the bigger nation, in order to win people in the midwest and everything else, it has to be relatable to things that matter to them. things like student debt are going to matter, things like jobs stability, so i think that candidate, it's what we make them talk about during the campaign that actually matters that will maybe show them as this middle, everybody loves me candidate, but we have to admit, when people run for office, everyone tends to be kind of catered to whatever questions are being asked of them, and to whoever's paying attention. that's why i want us to be paying attention more, because we'll be able to ask the questions and put them on the spot to answer them. >> okay, there are snacks in the back. [ laughter ] people should hang around. we're going to hang around for a little bit. i want everybody in the audience

to join me in thanking all three of our great panelists. [ applause ] >> i certainly learned a lot from all three of you, and, yes, feel free to stop by and say hello. >> thank you. >> okay, that was fun. >> yeah. tonight on american history tv, programming about ronald reagan. at 8:00 p.m., the ronald reagan symposium, focuses on the speeches that defined his administration, including what became known as the evil empire speech and his 1987 west berlin call to mikhail gorbachev to

tear down this wall. and at 9:10 people, a look brak to the british parliament address. this speech is remembered for reagan's declaration that the march of freedom and democrats would leave maxism lemonism on the ash heap of history. that's all coming up tonight on american history tv on c-span3. am. >> twitter chief communications officer gabriel stricker discusses the companies address to limit free speech concerns and limiting trolling. s he spoke at the university of california berkeley, which is celebrating the anniversary of the free speech movement on its campus. >> today, it's an absolute delight for me to introduce and welcome gabriel stricker.

he is a cal alum. he's chief of communications at twitter. chief communications officer. we will be welcoming back not just for this event, but he also has been helping berkeley think about and celebrate the 50-year anniversary of the free-speech movement, which is really quite an important year in berkeley this year. his bachelor of arts was in latin american studies as an undergraduate here at berkeley. his current role as chief communications officer, he leads the global teams for media relations and public policy and media partnerships more generally at twitter. he first came to twitter in 2012, stepping into what some have called one of the world's absolutely highest profile roles in the communications field. now, he has, in fact, been credited by many as the driving force behind turning around twitter's public reputation. gabriel has been well recognized for his success in the field.

he was listed by the holmes report as one of the world's 100 most influential corporate communicators, one of the top 20 digital influencers, and one of the 20 most effective communications professionals by business insider. prior to that, he was the director of global communications and public affairs at google, where he was active on the issue of free expression, and frequently defended the company's refusal to censor information. at twitter, he accepted the radio twitter and digital news association first amendment award. his earlier work was in campaign politics. he developed expertise in strategic communications through his work in the electoral arena. today we'll talk to him on a variety of topics, including leadership and what makes organizations work better. we'll have a chance also to celebrate with him as i

mentioned, this 50th anniversary of the free speech movement. so it was exactly that '64-'65 year. for those of you that know the free speech cafe, and the pictures of mario savio, it's a remarkable tradition for this institution and one that lives on for all of us. it is an important part of this institution, an important part of our society, and it is the notion of freedom of expression is not equally appreciated throughout the whole world and those different value judgments on where one draws the lines on expression is a very active area worldwide of policy and management. so there's much to cover. let me introduce to you gabriel strickler, and thank you very much for being here, gabriel. [ applause ] >> thank you. >> so let me start with the free speech movement. i mentioned it a couple of times.

when you think, so you weren't here in the '60s, but you were here a little bit after that. could you say a little bit of what you think about free speech how it relates to twitter and the fine line between freedom of expression and some of the things that happen when expression is too free. >> yeah. first of all, thank you all for having me. it's always lovely to be back. and yep, the free speech movement definitely predated me, but i think that even when i graduated here as an undergrad in the early '90s, that sort of spirit and the disruptive spirit of the free speech movement still lived on. and i think at the time, and i think today still on campus, there's an attempt to figure out how to keep that culture going. the good news is that that culture exists beyond that place and for many graduates like myself, who are now in companies like twitter and before that at google, we're still figuring out

how to ensure that those values are part of what we do. and for me, i get to go to work every day at a place that is, i think, arguably, one of the most extraordinary viral platforms that has ever existed. and it's been this amazing vector that's facilitated free expression around the world. i know the mythology is that we create these technologies with free expression in mind, like wouldn't it be amazing if we could create this platform that would let all of these flowers bloom. we had the idea all the time of what the impact of the platform would be, but we never thought that it would be used in the way that it has been and facilitate revolutions, as it has, and just giving people voices where they didn't, in the profound ways that it does. but it's an ongoing commitment to upholding the platform as we

do and as you say, it's a tricky one too, because in the same way for those of you who are less familiar with twitter, one of the parts of it that has allowed the rise of it as being this platform for free expression, we support pseudonyms. unlike other platforms that require you to give your actual identity, because we allow pseudonym support, if you go into cases like the arab spring, for example, turns out if you want to take down the man, it's a lot easier to do so if you don't have to say, here's exactly who i am and my real identity and my dress and so forth. the flip side of that spectrum is, if you don't have to give your actual identity, it makes it a lot easier for you to express yourself in, i would say, less constructive ways, not bringing down an oppressive regime, but potentially just in kind of cruel and abusive ways.

and that's a tricky balance. it's one that we're, today, grappling with. our ceo had one of our internal e-mails leaked out and our ceo was saying in his words, we have been falling short on striking that balance. and it's something we're trying to figure out. what are the ways to preserve the beauty of the platform as an incredible vehicle for free expression, while at the same time, having boundaries in there that prevent people from engaging in what is really at its core abusive behavior. so it's a daily challenge. >> yeah. and i guess part of it, if you felt that the pseudonyms allow many things and then there might be other tools to manage some of these unfortunate behaviors and outcomes that come from it. >> yeah, yeah. >> is there any example where, could you give us an example of where it's trolling and you say,

we've tried to address that issue in a more targeted way. >> yeah. i can tell you the things that we've done and the kind of things you can expect from us going forward. so some of the things -- and some of you may look at this as just sort of fixing bugs. some of them have been more or less difficult. we historically have done, i think, a pretty lackluster job of making it possible to even report abuse. the amount of hoops people had to go through even to just say, hey, this person is engaging with me in a super abusive manner. it has to be the case that it's roughly as easy to report the abuse as it is to do the buysa g abusing. i think in our case it was easy to engage in the abuse and hard to report it. so that's something we've gone out of our way to fix. the next step is, i think, in

again, balancing the ability for someone to express themselves freely, but also giving someone the ability to not have to be exposed to what is abusive behavior, the next steap is, because again for those of you less familiar with twitter, one of his hallmarks, we have an asymmetrical follow graph, technically what that means is, we can follow each other, we can both follow each other, but it can be the case that you follow me, but i don't follow you. part of what our thinking is, if you are sending tweets to me throughout the day, saying, you're a jerk, if we follow each other, i'm presumably saying, i want to hear you telling me that i'm a jerk. but if i don't follow you and you're telling me throughout the day that i'm a jerk, and trust me, we have far more colorful examples than just saying that somebody is a jerk, maybe there should be ways that if urbom

barding me with this, i should have greater control at tuning that out. that's kind of what we're trying to pave the way towards. >> that's a super example. for those of you that are tweeting, #haas speakers, no gaps. if you want to tweet any of this. and i will certainly tweet. i always take notes and i always tweet after talks and i will do it again. i personally so appreciate twitter. just a quick aside, when i first became dean, people were saying, you should do these blog posts. i could spend my day doing that. but 140 characters once or twice a day, it's just a great bite size for putting out thoughts. i think for a lot of us that are in seats where we get to hear a lot of interesting things every

day. that's one ever tof the functiot i'm doing, lets me bounce them back out, so other people get to hear some of the stuff that i'm hearing. recently, twit ter sued the federal government over the ability to disclose more information in its ongoing transparency report. so could you talk a little bit about that public policy interface. >> yeah. so, i should just say that twitter was not the first to have a transparency report. i think actually, when i was at google, we started that process of issuing these transparency reports, and what they are, when technology companies get requested from governments around the world, specifically to take action on certain content, and it could be to remove content, because it violates their local laws, to suspend certain accounts, similarly because it's against whatever their local policies are, a lot of the companies in

our space have felt like there needs to be a way, in some centralized fashion, to disclose to the people of the world, hey, we're getting these requests. you should be aware of them. not just to say, we're getting these requests, but here are the nature of the requests and here's what governments are giving us these requests and here's how many there are and how to categorize them and what action we took coming off of these things. and i guess without getting into too much detail, regarding a lawsuit, but just on a high level, it turns out there is a government, it is ours here in the united states, that wanted to limit our ability as a company to tell people. and again, it's not just twitter users. it happens to be that there are individual users who are impacted by this, that we take action on posts that they've made. but if you are, i would argue,

if you're a user, or if you are just a member of this society, you have a right to know. you have a right to know that your government is making requests of a private company like ours, and what we're doing with that. we should be able to disclose in a reasonable amount of detail what is the sort of boundaries surrounding those requests. what is going on there. and we had engaged in conversations about this, in terms of our ability to be more transparent in our transparency report, and finally, when we reached an impasse, we said, we're going to -- we will not abide by this. we will sue you over our ability to be more transparent with our users and people of the world. and so that's what motivated it, and it continues to motivate it.

i think there are other companies that i think share our opinion, but i think we just took it another step to force the issue in a way. >> and could you -- because we had an earlier brief conversation about values. and when one thinks about the culture, the shared values that hold twitter together, that make it what it is, i would imagine that when you are making a decision about how aggressively to pursue an issue like that, it does come back to very fundamental values. so can you talk a little bit about how that particular decision about transparency connects to the value of the firm. >> yeah, you know, at the end of the day, some of this is not all that complicated. we end up running the company in more or less some kind of golden rule type of way, which is, as we conceive of, and implement these policies, what we as users

want to exist in a product that has these policies? and by and large, that's what we're trying to do. or if there's an environment surrounding us that is unfavorable, we try to go about and change those things. now, i would say, some of these types of decisions, including the decision to sue our own government, are internally pretty uncontroversial, because i would say as a leadership team, we have prealigned values and i think we've gone about building out a team, it's not in a group-think way, but we have values and we believe -- [ inaudible ] -- that as a leadership team it reflects the values that we have on the platform. it's a responsibility. earlier, we were talking about the free speech movement. i believe that there are a

handful of companies in the world, and you probably can count them on two hands, that transcend just being companies and become themselves a movement. and i think twitter is one. and with that comes real responsibility. people are depending on us to be able to achieve things that go far beyond business or just culture. it's actually achieving higher purpose. so as we go about our business, these are the types of weighty things that we're considering day in and day out. >> it's an interesting notion when an enterprise becomes a movement. twitter is a great example of that. how about the public offering of twitter, does the change of ownership and control, did it have an effect? >> you know, i think when we were in the process of going

public, a lot of people, there were many folks on the sidelines who were saying, all of twitter's talk of being purpose-driven, or what have you, get ready, it's all going to go out the window. and i actually think that when part of the significance in some ways, of our lawsuit, was eye-opening for many of those people. oh, wow, these guys are still going to stick to the values they've been having all along. but of the speculation that existed around how becoming a publicly traded company would change us, i think somehow, some way, this was the conspiracy theory premise of it all is how i would frame it. now they're publicly traded, are beholden to investor interests, they will sell out their values in order to adhere to all these financial pressures, which have existed all along.

ps, those pressures did not exist all along. it never was the case. in all of our time that the sort of tension that we experience day in and day out was a tension somehow between everyday users and business interests, that was never the source of the tension. the source of the tension is sort of what we were talking about earlier, which is the tension that exists between one group of users and another group of users. and how do we navigate those waters. those tensions still exist. but being a publicly traded company, i don't think has really -- it has done nothing to change our values or how we've approached going about our work. i think it's brought maybe a slightly brighter spotlight, but it's -- for those of you who will go out and be parts of publicly traded companies, pre and post-ipo, i hope you'll realize that it's just yet another moment in the company's

evolution, and then you go public and you wake up the next day and go to work. that's how that is. >> you obviously love your job. what do you love most about your job? >> i do think it goes back to the idea of it being a movement. because i think you can work at any number of companies or organizations, but there are few opportunities that you have in life. earlier, before we were hopping on stage, we were talking about these sort of four presets that you have here at the business school. and i love this fourth one of beyond yourself. what an inspiring plank to have on your platform. and what i love about my work and what i really just have long been inspired by in technology generally is, if you're lucky you get to be part of a company

that is a movement, that is beyond itself. it's beyond any one of us. and the impact that you get to have on the planet, starts to go beyond, yeah, i went to work and i sold a widget, versus i went to work today and i changed the world for the better. it sounds trite, but i think that certainly for us, we got to see this. and the technology in twitter's case, begins to take on a life of itself own, and be used in ways that we would have never anticipated. and it's inspiring. it's absolutely inspiring. >> it really is. >> this gentleman spoke for us, he spoke across the street, he and i were walking back, and one of our employees here, who had grown up here, walked up to us as we were coming on to the premises here, and she talked

about how influential twitter had been for her family. and she had some remarkable stories and it was just right there, somebody that i see every day, talking about her family and the role that twitter played. i know you hear those stories often, but it's very poignant. >> we hear them often and we see this unfolding, but -- i know it's actually just talking to a group of employees who started yesterday and they were asking, basically, does this ever get old? do you ever come to work and kind of get jaded by, oh, yeah, this extraordinary thing happened -- no, we don't get jaded. it doesn't get old. i came to work a couple weeks ago, and as a user, got to see somebody who's tweeting images of our planet from geostationary orbit. like that doesn't get old. hopefully if it does get old, we should go do something else,

because i think, no, we never thought that these things would be used in this way, but, yeah, it does change the world, in sometimes more trivial ways, but sometimes extremely profound ways. >> absolutely. so your job is different than a lot of people's roles. could you talk a little bit about maybe some -- on the personal advice front -- risks that you took that sort of opened up some path ways that might not have been there in your career. >> yeah. so -- and please, since another one of your planks is to question the status quo, so do not take my status quo as the gospel. but i -- so now my responsibility at twitter is overseeing our communications team and our public policy team and our media team. it's a departure from what i was

doing earlier in my career, which was working on political campaigns. and, look, electoral politics is a perfectly noble profession. but i think the main insight that i had was that my hunger for participating in that process, was facilitating some form of social change. and what i realized at a certain point was that the impact that i myself could have on that social change was pretty limited. and i was living on the east coast at the time, looking back to the west coast where i grew up, and i was like, that's where the change is happening. those are the people who are really revolutionizing the world, i want to be part of that. coincidentally, it's not that unlike what happened during the free speech movement, where you

had people who were watching news reelz on the act of the united states at what was happening in berkeley and saying, i want to be part of that thing. and i guess the lesson that i would give on this is that, when i look back on it, i had known for sometime, that electoral politics, i wasn't getting what i wanted to or needed to out of it. i think it probably took me longer, in hindsight, than it should have, to make the change. and i think, i talked to new people, particularly new grads who work with us a lot about this, where you may not be certain what your calling and what your passion is, and in that case, keep experimenting. but the flip side of that is, there are many people, and if you really push them on it, they will tell you, they'll say, i don't know what my calling is, but what i'm doing isn't that. and yet they don't have the

courage to make the change. >> yeah. >> and so for me, the main lesson was, when i knew that that wasn't my calling, it probably was, i don't know, a year or couple of years before i really owned that and said, you know what, i'm going to honor the fact that i know this isn't the right path for me and go and pursue something else. >> yeah. and part of that transition, i think for all of us, the kernel of that notion of facilitating social change, we don't always know what that kernel is. once we identify a kernel, then the options that are likely to be more aligned become a little clearer. >> that's what -- i'll tell you, for me, part of the insight that i had, came out of trying to create a little bit of distance from it and saying, okay, what is it that i'm doing? what's the pleasure that i derive from this? what is it that's inspiring to me about it?

is this the best sort of venue for me to be living that out? >> yeah. >> and even in the world of media and communications and public policy, didn't necessarily know that, like that is the job for me. but the insight that i had, it seems like technology is the general venue for me to live this out. >> yeah, great, great. and gabriel as a leadership, as a manager, what is your leadership style? how have -- has your thinking on leadership changed in the last few years? >> my thinking on leadership and management is in some ways -- many ways, informed by my experience in political campaigns. which, if you were going to have -- first on management and then i would just say on leadership. but if you were going to try to

create a petry dish of how not to manage people, you would have created a political campaign. and i suppose to be fair, it's been a long time since i've worked on a political campaign, so let me just give that space, the benefit of the doubt, but at the time, it was in this country, at least, so you have an environment where it is very transaction-based. you have a bunch of people who are trying to win something by a certain date, and it doesn't lend itself to really nurturing people over a long period of time and invest in their careers and growth over a long period of time. it's really transactional in that way. so, for me, so much of, i would say, my approach to management and then more broadly, leadership, was informed by -- >> what was not happening. >> -- and i think the beauty of

the technology industry is, you end up getting a lot less experienced people who bring really, really new ideas to the table, and if you can embrace that and so i would say to the question of my leadership style, i really, really try to give people a ton of room to make a lot of small mistakes. and i believe that as leaders and managers, you know, again, some time from now, you could have someone on the stage who says, yeah, i want people to fail and it's easy to say. and i think you can't just say that. you actually really need to, especially for less experienced people, you need to go out of your way to force them to make mistakes. and i remember, i had one -- i had someone who would work for

me, who was so risk averse, and i would say, you really need to make mistakes, like, you need to be taking more risks. and we have these kind of quarterly objectives and measurable goals. a lot of companies have these things. and i had said to her, here's what's going to happen for you when you set out your quarterly goals, i want you to put in there, that you're going to make a certain number of mistakes. and at the end of the quarter, we're going to refer back on the mistakes that you made and what you learned from them. and i think unless you're really deliberate with people about this, it's not going to happen. so, i guess my style is, letting people -- encouraging people to take risks, encouraging them to make mistakes, and having an understanding that they are unable to make catastrophic mistakes. because if someone who is working for you, makes a

catastrophic mistake, that is your responsibility as a leader, that you put them in a situation that they could even make a catastrophic mistake to begin with. you should put them in a position where they can make small learning mistakes, and then really, if there is something that is cataclysmic that's happening on your watch, it's up to you to take responsibility for that. that's how you gain trust as a leader. >> and those are the stretch assignments as well. just popped into my head, but one of our faculty, noble-prize winner, ollie williamson, i remember was giving a speech, it was a commencement speech. he was mentioning, a ph.d. student, but it was a project and he was describing what he wanted a ph.d. student to do, and the student said, i don't know if i can do that. and he said, i wouldn't have asked you to do it if i didn't think you could do that. right? so there's a profoundly validating element of ush

approximating pieces to places, so that's a great management style in itself. can i ask you one more question about culture, and then we'll open it up to the floor, because i know we have a lot of questions and thoughts in the room. so when you think your sort of role as -- on the senior team in helping to shape and strengthen and keep healthy the culture, the norms and values within twitter, can you say a little bit about how you think about that part of your role, that kind of inward-facing role. >> yeah, this is -- so culture is a living, breathing thing. and i think, as -- especially in the technology world, where you have companies like twitter that are young, twitter will turn 9 later this year. i know that for some of you, you hear this and you're like, my god, twitter been there forever. twitter has not been there forever. not even close.

and yet, because of, i think, the trunkated cycles of our role in the media and technology world, it -- there's a sense of attachment to things, including culture, and so even in companies like ours, there's this sort of pull to preserve parts of our culture. and at twitter -- >> and are they well identified? >> they are. we have certain, like you have these four core values, at twitter, we have a number of them too. and we want to create a culture where those values can continue to exist. >> yeah. >> but that's different from preserving a culture. i actually think -- so inwardly facing, our responsibility as a leadership team, is to create an environment where those types of

values can continue to flourish. and also, being really open-minded about when some of these things are falling down. i'll give you a specific example. we have two core values, which are deliberately in opposition to one another. one of which is, to be rigorous and get it right. and another is to ship it. we talked about launching things as shipping things. now ship it is like, just get it out the door. be rigorous and get it right is a very different, sort of slower thoughtful value. and those two things are at odds with one another. and when, as a comp, we felt like hey, the fact that these two things are at odds with one another is slowing us down, creating tension that we don't need, it's building in head winds that are counterproductive, then it's our

responsibility as a leadership team, one, two acknowledge this, because i think where companies tend to fall down is, these things sort of passive voice exist. oh, this is happening. >> no, it isn't happening. you're building this. you sit at that table. if you're doing nothing, you're standing by, then you're facilitating this apparently counterproductive thing to happen. so that's one acknowledgement that's going on. and two, acknowledgement for everyone outside of the room that it's going on and say, even if it's the case that we don't have the answer, it's something that we're thinking about and are trying to address. and i think part of us as a culture, we were talking earlier about our external transparency report, we try to be pretty radically transparent internally too. and so as a leadership team, sure, we're deliberating over any number of things that impact our culture, but we try,

whenever possible, even if it's in progress, to share that with the company as it's happening. >> that's great. a great internal norm. those are some of the difficult conversations that aren't usually framed that way. normally when we hear the phrase difficult conversations, we're thinking about a manager and a direct report and something didn't go writright. but this notion of saying, there's a tension in our work environment, we don't have the answer yet, but let's talk about it and think about it. questions from the audience, let's open it up. we have a couple of microphones. we want to capture it in the video and, i think we have the capability to have questions come in remotely. >> a recently article at npr highlighted the role that twitter was playing in journalism in mexico with the cartel violence that was erupting. and one woman's account was then hacked and it stated th